Re: lynx-dev memory leaks vs corruption

[David Woolley]

>  
> how does that corrupt memory?
> surely, if it's been freed, it's not there to be freed again.

Typically the program says free the memory at this address.  The program
still has "this address" when it tries to free again.  Unless the
memory allocator takes steps to ensure that what is at "this address"
is allocated memory, it can end up corrupting its free memory list.
It is relatively expensive to check this compared with simply taking
the value on trust.

Some programs can be very intensive in their use of malloc, so it needs
to be fast.