Dangling pointers and memory leak locations within software are detected. As the software allocates and deallocates memory, lists of pointers referencing the memory, and pointer status, are maintained. As the software writes new addresses within pointers and reads addresses referenced by the pointers, the pointer lists are maintained to determine whether the pointers are dangling and to detect memory leak locations. A balanced binary tree having a number of nodes can be maintained. The nodes represent heap or stack records. Each heap record corresponds to heap memory that has been allocated and has a list of pointers referencing the heap memory. Each stack record corresponds to a stack within which a stack frame is allocated each time a function is entered. The stack record has frame records corresponding to the stack frames. Each frame record has a list of pointers referencing the corresponding stack frame.