> As for the "memory leaks" --- I haven't looked at the source, but something whose runtime is very short-lived, like pkg-config, may be very well justified in allocating and never freeing, letting the process exit itself be the "ultimate free". I've seen and done this many times myself.

This makes sense, and then somebody has a vision for a use case beyond the original imagination, goes to turn the code into a library and spends countless hours smartening up lazy resource management. Whether the original author should be "more responsible" is open for debate, but I've personally run into the above situation, and only mention for another perspective on The Life of Code.

Edit: s/coffee/code/