The minor discussion on the C version's memory leaks reminded me of a neat trick. If you're developing a short lived application, like pkg-config, you can opt to never deallocate. i.e. leak everything. In lightweight, short lived applications there's usually not a lot of incentive to deallocate; your application will never use much memory anyway and the deallocations waste time.

You can think of it like treating C as a garbage collected language, except the garbage collection cycle occurs only once at the end of the program :P

It really can be an effective trick. Deallocation isn't free, and under certain loads can be quite expensive.

The 1000+ leaks in the C version might actually be what's giving it the slight run-time advantage.