Static Allocation, Constant Work
A technical discussion regarding memory safety issues in software development, specifically focusing on use-after-free bugs and object pools. The author explores how memory management errors can lead to type confusion and potential security vulnerabilities.
Why it matters
Understanding memory safety is critical for building secure, reliable software systems and preventing exploitable vulnerabilities in low-level programming.
Memory Safety’s Hardest Problem named something I’d hit but couldn’t articulate. Your case is a pointer into one union variant surviving a write of a different variant, so live typed pointers end up reading bytes that belong to something else now.
Last year I wrote a limit-order matching engine and shipped a use-after-free: a cancelled order was released back to the pool while it was still linked into its price level, so the next allocation handed that memory to a new order and the stale link kept resolving. I’d filed it under “I was careless with lifetimes.”
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