1. C malloc debug library Provides routines that can be plugged in to replace malloc(), realloc(), calloc(), and free(). If you're not debugging, and an allocation fails, FDA will call user supplied callbacks to allow you to free up some memory or shut down the program cleanly -- this means you don't have to check the return values from malloc if you don't want to. For debugging FDA provides a nice toolkit for validating pointers, checking for leaks, gathering memory statistics, bounds checking and other nice things. FDA uses shredding, prefix and postfix signatures, and a liberal amount of predicate asserts. From Debian 3.0r0 APT