[alexgartrell]

A professor actually told us that freeing prior to exit was harmful, because you may spend all of that time resurrecting swapped pages for no real benefit.

Counterpoint is that debugging leaks is ~hopeless unless you have the ability to prune “intentional leaks” at exit

[enriquto]

> debugging leaks is ~hopeless unless you have the ability to prune “intentional leaks” at exit

Not in general. It depends on your debugger. For example, valgrind distinguishes between harmless "visible leaks", memory blocks allocated from main or on global variables, and "true leaks" that you cannot free anymore. The first ones are given a simple warning by the leak detector, while the true leaks are actual errors.

[cryptonector]

I had to debug a program that did just that once, long ago, and the fix was to not free on exit. The program's behavior had been that it took ~20m and then one day it ran for hours and we never found out how long it would have taken. Fortunately it was a Tcl program, and the fix was to remove `unset`s of large hash tables before exiting.