> There is no point in freeing blocks at the end of a program, because all of the program’s space is given back to the system when the process terminates.
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Freeing-a...
I think many GNU tools just never free any memory.
For example, GCC : https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=66339
-- edit: added GCC as example.
...unless you are trying to find memory leaks in your program. In that case it would be very helpful if the program, and the libraries it uses, were written to actively free all allocated memory.
> I think many GNU tools just never free any memory
It is absolutely true that some GNU software (including libraries like glib) allocate memory that they never intend to free. This causes leak analysis of programs that link with these libraries to be more painful than necessary.
You are conflating unfreed memory with unreferencable memory.
You can compile large C++ projects in a GB of RAM based netbook with Clang and ZRAM.
If your process is a server or a daemon or something then restarting each instance every N hours is a nice backstop but memory leaks are still a frightening spanner in the works!