Comment by tyhoff

Author here. Firmware, for better and worse, is stuck in C/C++ land, so many of the topics here are essential to keep a complex, multi-MCU, multi-board setup in working order.

I'm actually really curious what you all do in C/C++ to prevent bad operations from ever being performed in the first place.

For example, should we just change our internal malloc / free to use double pointers instead?

  bool malloc(size_t n, void **ptr) {
    *ptr = <memory>
  }

  void free(void **ptr) {
    ... <free>
    *ptr = NULL 
  }

This way, if anyone actually tries to use that pointer, it will crash the system (hardfault), instead of potentially using corrupted memory, which IMO is much worse.