Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: Memory Safety Patterns

Implement memory-safe programming with RAII, ownership, smart pointers, and resource management across Rust, C++, and C. Use when writing safe systems code, managing resources, or preventing memory bugs.

UncategorizedID: wshobson/agents/memory-safety-patterns

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wshobson/agents
wshobsonLicense: MIT
32,1353,507

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pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/wshobson/agents/tree/HEAD/plugins/systems-programming/skills/memory-safety-patterns

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plugins/systems-programming/skills/memory-safety-patterns/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
memory-safety-patterns
Description
Implement memory-safe programming with RAII, ownership, smart pointers, and resource management across Rust, C++, and C. Use when writing safe systems code, managing resources, or preventing memory bugs.

Memory Safety Patterns

Cross-language patterns for memory-safe programming including RAII, ownership, smart pointers, and resource management.

When to Use This Skill

  • Writing memory-safe systems code
  • Managing resources (files, sockets, memory)
  • Preventing use-after-free and leaks
  • Implementing RAII patterns
  • Choosing between languages for safety
  • Debugging memory issues

Core Concepts

1. Memory Bug Categories

| Bug Type | Description | Prevention | | -------------------- | -------------------------------- | ----------------- | | Use-after-free | Access freed memory | Ownership, RAII | | Double-free | Free same memory twice | Smart pointers | | Memory leak | Never free memory | RAII, GC | | Buffer overflow | Write past buffer end | Bounds checking | | Dangling pointer | Pointer to freed memory | Lifetime tracking | | Data race | Concurrent unsynchronized access | Ownership, Sync |

2. Safety Spectrum

Manual (C) → Smart Pointers (C++) → Ownership (Rust) → GC (Go, Java)
Less safe                                              More safe
More control                                           Less control

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

Best Practices

Do's

  • Prefer RAII - Tie resource lifetime to scope
  • Use smart pointers - Avoid raw pointers in C++
  • Understand ownership - Know who owns what
  • Check bounds - Use safe access methods
  • Use tools - AddressSanitizer, Valgrind, Miri

Don'ts

  • Don't use raw pointers - Unless interfacing with C
  • Don't return local references - Dangling pointer
  • Don't ignore compiler warnings - They catch bugs
  • Don't use unsafe carelessly - In Rust, minimize it
  • Don't assume thread safety - Be explicit

Debugging Tools

# AddressSanitizer (Clang/GCC)
clang++ -fsanitize=address -g source.cpp

# Valgrind
valgrind --leak-check=full ./program

# Rust Miri (undefined behavior detector)
cargo +nightly miri run

# ThreadSanitizer
clang++ -fsanitize=thread -g source.cpp