Adding debugging options is a very useful alternative under the development stage of a program. You would then compile with

c++  -g -O0 -c  mycode.cpp
c++  -g -O0 -o  mycode.exe  mycode.o

This option generates debugging information allowing you to trace for example if an array is properly allocated. Some compilers work best with the no optimization option -O0.

Depending on the compiler, one can add flags which generate code that catches integer overflow errors. The flag -ftrapv does this for the CLANG compiler on OS X operating systems.