Memory debugging tool for Python/C API?

[Robert Latest]

Hello,

extending Python in C ist just the coolest thing since sliced bread (and
I'm particularly happy because I really had started to miss C when I did
more and more things in Python).

I've got one question though. Tha C/API documentation is not quite clear
(to me, anyway) on what happens exactly to ressources between the
C/Python side. One example is this: I wrote a function that assembles a
string into a dynamically-allocated buffer, then creates a PyString from
it which it returns to the Python side:

PyObject *dyn_string(void)
{
    char *buffer = malloc(20);
    PyObject *pystr;
    strcpy(buffer, "Hello, World");
    pystr = PyString_FromString(buffer);
    free(buffer);
    return pystr;
}

This works, but I'm not sure if PyString...() really makes a new copy of
the data (ellowing me to use free()), or if this will segfault one day.
OTOH I wouldn't know how to safely dispose of the string data otherwise.

Another example (all on the C side of things) is a function where I
build a dictionary from a set of keys, putting PyNone into each value
(Py_INCREF()ing PyNone each time).  At another point some of the values
are replaced by other PyObjects. At first I used PyDECREF() on each
value before setting the new value, but that botched up the dictionary
beyond repair. Without the PyDECREF() calls everything worked fine.

Now to my actual question: Is there some sort of debugging tool that I
could use to analyze my code to see if everything gets properly
allocated and deallocated and if the reference counting works right?

Thanks,
robert