Sure, it's doable, but it was in this case the source of the issue, along with some obfuscation of where and when those particular sections of code were being executed through shenanigans with encapsulation and inheritance (I respect people who can manage their pointers well, but I genuinely dislike a lot of OO practices even aside from if they're done "well"). People write exceptional code in C despite and sometimes because of it not protecting you from writing it wrong. I respect the view that some people don't need their programming languages to protect them from these problems. In this case, it helped quite a lot, especially since the application was essentially reimplementing vector processing, getting the memory management wrong, and not doing anything to justify not taking advantage of the insane degree of optimization that's gone into std::vector