to skip every other slot and to right-align all allocations

We could pair that with a simple check at each unsafe.Pointer conversion: any time we convert an integer to an unsafe.Pointer, we could validate that either the pointer points outside the Go heap, or the pointer points to an allocated object. (Do we do that already?)

We could take that one step further and, upon converting from unsafe.Pointer to a concrete type, validate that its heap map matches the pointer layout for the type to which it was converted.

If that's too expensive, we could consider adding a function to make that check explicitly (e.g., in the runtime/debug package):

// CheckPointers verifies that all of the pointers reachable from p either
// are nil or point to mapped addresses, and that the pointer maps for all
// such addresses that reside in Go memory match their types.
func CheckPointers(p interface{})

Such a function might be useful for cgo sanity checking anyway (#19928).

We could pair that with a simple check at each unsafe.Pointer conversion: any time we convert an integer to an unsafe.Pointer, we could validate that either the pointer points outside the Go heap, or the pointer points to an allocated object. (Do we do that already?)

That could also be a good test. Though this couldn't be enabled on-the-fly, so it would be harder to use in unit tests.

func CheckPointers(p interface{})

I'm not sure this is strong enough to conveniently write past-the-end tests. You may not have a direct pointer to the object containing a bad pointer, which suggests CheckPointers would have to be deep, and now you've got a garbage collector.

CheckPointers would have to be deep, and now you've got a garbage collector.

Agreed. I was hoping there might be a similar function in the existing garbage collector that we could generalize. (Some sort of “pointers starting from p visitor” function, perhaps.)