When dealing with random memory overwrites, in MSVC it is possible to validate the state of the heap at various points with a call to _CrtCheckMemory, and know with at least a small level of confidence that the code up until the check was not responsible for any errors that might cause new or malloc to fail later.
In XCode, whats the equivalent way to try and box in a memory overwrite? All I have at the moment is a random failure of a call to new, somewhere deep in the bowels of some code with no real idea of how long the code has been running with a corrupt heap up until that point.
This feature IS actually built into the heap in GCC.
As described here
The easiest way to enable it is on the XCode::Run menu:
Enable Guard Malloc