Build with ASAN

[shamefulCake1]

Describe the idea

ASAN is a GCC/CLANG feature which is testing a program for memory errors and leaks. It is mostly just two compiler switches and two linker switches, plus a bit of fiddling with report files.

Fundamentally, it is maintaining a copy of a program's memory, so memory consumption grows twice, and speed usually falls twice, but on modern hardware this is usually imperceptible, and in this sense it is MUCH more convenient than the previous generation of dynamic memory analysers, such as valgrind. In fact, it is so fast that certain Android smartphone OEMs build their production Android systems with ASAN enabled and sell them like this.

ASAN is routinely used with Chrome CI.

It should be done because

C is powerful, fast, but dangerous language, having ASAN enabled at least on debug builds/CI would bring it on par in memory safety to a lot of modern "fancy" programming languages, without sacrificing the versatility and speed of C.

In addition, it is good at indicating "bad architecture" pieces of software, because those are naturally prone to memory errors.

What are the alternatives?

1. Not do it, live as before, hoping on "this will not happen to me".
2. Use Valgrind, which is very slow.
3. Rewrite XLibre in ADA/SPARK, a memory-safe language. (Practically infeasible.)

Additional context

Clang supports ASAN better than GCC, but GCC, especially in recent versions, can do it too.

Implementing this proposal should be quite easy, no specific physics, biology, software trickery knowledge required.

It would perform best with having a CI implemented.

Extra fields

• I have checked the existing New Ideas, RFCs Of The Core Team, Ideas Soon To Be Addressed and Someday Ideas
• I have read the Contributing Guidelines
• I'd like to work on this idea