Re: reclaiming memory before exit

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2020-05-16 at 01:03 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Well, my experience is different. Last month, I analyzed a program
> that uses GNU libtextstyle, and the valgrind "leak" reports could be
> categorized into three groups:
>   * 1056 + 296 + 56 bytes, allocated through cr_style_init_properties
>     (inside libcroco). This is a statically allocated hash table with
>     a fixed number of entries. It can be ignored.
>   * Allocations inside libcurses. Discussed in this thread: [2].
>   * A real leak, which I fixed. [3]

Interesting.  I have run valgrind many times on GNU make, which uses a
lot of allocated memory which is referred to by global variables and is
not freed at exit, and I don't recall seeing these reported as leaks.

I will have to run again and refresh my memory as it's been some months
since I tried it last.

In any event, it seems to me to be a deficiency in the detection if it
reports allocated memory which is still referenced to by global
variables, or even static variables, as memory leaks.