Thinking aloud, and this is probably a bad idea for reasons I haven’t thought of.

What if pointers were a combination of values, like a 32 bit “zone” plus a 32 bit “offset” (where 32/32 is probably really 28/36 or something that allows >4GB allocations, but let’s figure that out later). Then each malloc() could increment the zone number, or pick an unused one randomly, so that there’s enormous space between consecutive allocs and an address wouldn’t be reissued quickly. A dangling pointer would the point at an address that isn’t mapped at all until possibly 2^32 malloc()s later. It wouldn’t help with long-lived dangling pointers, but would catch accessing a pointer right after it was freed.

I guess, more generally, why are addresses reused before they absolutely must be?