in c code you will see malloc, alloc, free w/e scattered through the code base, most static tools lack because they don’t control the memory and just analyze address spaces or do static code analysis. they look top down and try to catch errors.

zig’s design forces you to create a memory allocator before any object initializations (alloc/free) and is typically constructed at the top level and passed through to functions. this allows you to swap implementation easily and use the allocator to claim memory or return an error to the caller if it can’t.

you can do some simple static allocator, general purpose allocator (can grow memory space as you allocate more objects) or in this case to test memory safety a debug allocator which you use in your tests. This moves the memory inspection inside of where your program allocates memory. this is more of an inside out approach where the analysis is produced by controlling the memory allocations and frees through a standard interface.