Re: reclaiming memory before exit

[Bruno Haible]

Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> > Building RPMs with -Dlint would mean performance
> > penalty because some programs (e.g. sort) would explicitly release complex
> > data structures just before exit, which is wasteful.
> 
> I think it may be a bit presumptuous to call cleanup wasteful.
> 
> Proper cleanup is inefficient in in some cases, but execution time is
> only one metric. It may not be an important metric, either.
> 
> Proper cleanup is necessary in other cases, like performing security
> testing and evaluation. Memory checkers like Asan and Valgrind can't
> differentiate between the "good" memory leaks and the "bad" ones.

We discussed this already in the thread starting at [1].

Bruno

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2018-10/msg00026.html