[jerrysievert]

Interestingly, SillyMUD and its descendant Phoenix at one point had similar memory checks that occurred at runtime, as well as shared memory with reference counting and a paging virtual memory system.

Unfortunately, even with that and it having been run with purify (a commercial predecessor to valgrind), i was still able to find some severe memory issues that didn’t manifest by compiling with address and memory sanitization about 25 years later.

[stensal]

I didn't know SillyMUD. But I did read the paper about an interpretation based memory checking tool many years ago. Unfortunately, I forgot the name. I believe the interpretation based memory checking tool assigns each pointer a type. So the idea is not new.

ASAN is great because of its compatibility with existing libraries, as you have pointed out, is available in both gcc/clang. Valgrind is in the same league. Both are fantastic tools even though they might miss some errors.