We need this in a few places and while calling Gestalt() isn’t that much code, that function is deprecated in 10.8 and the alternative is a lot more code, so we don’t want to repeat that once we update the code.
20% of reported crashes are in launch_tbz which indirectly call oak::c_array. My hunch is that the c_str buffer is overwritten because the std::string which returned it has been disposed, this makes strdup() do a bad allocation / memory read.
This would likely be a race condition (wrt. the c_str buffer) and coincidentally the oak::c_array is called in a thread (when it crashes).