This is a perfectly reasonable question, asked out of innocent curiosity; the negative reactions to it are disgraceful. I think building such a compiler would

This is a perfectly reasonable question, asked out of innocent curiosity; the negative reactions to it are disgraceful. I think building such a compiler would impractical, because in C, you can turn a pointer into an integer and back again. While it's an integer, you can hide it in ways that would make it invisible to a garbage collector. For example, in a xor linked list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list