You miss the point. If you have full control over when and how getenv is called, there's no issue to begin with. The problem is that you don't, as OP demonstrates. It's perfectly natural to call getaddrinfo in a loop.

We need a new API which is not broken like in NetBSD, and a multi-year migration of all core libraries to it. Well a pity it wasn't started years ago though, could've been 95% done by now.

And how would you free it? The current posix API doesn't have any way to reliably free the result returned by `getenv`.