In order to deliver an experience of programmer happiness to users of Ruby, the developers of CRuby itself (as well as the authors of extension gems) must cut through the dangerous jungle of manual memory management in C. Simple mistakes in the use of pointers, or failing to follow the Ruby garbage collector's rules precisely, can work fine on development machines but cause rare, hard to debug crashes in production environments.

ASAN (Address SANitizer) is a tool for instrumenting compiled code to catch invalid memory accesses as they happen and crash the program immediately, leading you straight to the buggy code. This is far easier to troubleshoot than crashing at some later point, when the memory corruption has caused some other, totally innocent code to crash!

In this talk, you'll learn how to enable ASAN in your builds (of both Ruby itself and of extension gems), and how to interpret its output. We'll also cover a little bit about how ASAN works in CRuby.