除非“使用”的内存量不断增长，否则我不认为这是内存泄漏。有一些未释放的内存，虽然不是理想的，但不是一个大问题，除非所需的内存数量不断增长。

这是一个非常特定的领域，几乎不值得回答。动动你的脑袋。

航天飞机操作系统:不，不允许内存泄漏 快速开发概念验证代码:修复所有这些内存泄漏是浪费时间。

还有一系列的中间情况。

延迟产品发布以修复除最严重内存泄漏外的所有内存泄漏的机会成本($$$)通常会让“草率或不专业”的感觉相形见绌。你的老板付钱给你是为了给他赚钱，而不是为了得到温暖、模糊的感觉。

I'm going to give the unpopular but practical answer that it's always wrong to free memory unless doing so will reduce the memory usage of your program. For instance a program that makes a single allocation or series of allocations to load the dataset it will use for its entire lifetime has no need to free anything. In the more common case of a large program with very dynamic memory requirements (think of a web browser), you should obviously free memory you're no longer using as soon as you can (for instance closing a tab/document/etc.), but there's no reason to free anything when the user selects clicks "exit", and doing so is actually harmful to the user experience.

为什么?释放内存需要接触内存。即使您的系统的malloc实现碰巧没有在分配的内存块附近存储元数据，您也可能会遍历递归结构，只是为了找到所有需要释放的指针。

Now, suppose your program has worked with a large volume of data, but hasn't touched most of it for a while (again, web browser is a great example). If the user is running a lot of apps, a good portion of that data has likely been swapped to disk. If you just exit(0) or return from main, it exits instantly. Great user experience. If you go to the trouble of trying to free everything, you may spend 5 seconds or more swapping all the data back in, only to throw it away immediately after that. Waste of user's time. Waste of laptop's battery life. Waste of wear on the hard disk.

这不仅仅是理论上的。每当我发现自己加载了太多的应用程序，磁盘开始抖动时，我甚至不会考虑点击“退出”。我以最快的速度到达一个终端，输入killall -9…因为我知道"退出"只会让情况更糟。

我只看到了一个实际的缺点，那就是这些良性泄漏将在内存泄漏检测工具中显示为误报。

If I understood correctly, you don't explicitly free memory (which can be freed because you still have a pointer) and rely on OS to free it during process termination. Though this may seem okay for simple program, consider the situation where your code is moved into a library and becomes a part of some resident daemon process running 24/7. Say this daemon spawns a thread each time it needs to do something useful using your code and say it spawns thousands of threads every hour. In this case you will get real memory leak.

不幸的是，这种情况在现实生活中并非不可能，一致的内存管理技术可能会使您的生活更轻松。

在应用程序运行后清理操作系统在概念上没有问题。

这实际上取决于应用程序以及它将如何运行。在需要运行数周的应用程序中不断发生的泄漏必须得到处理，但是一个不需要太多内存就能计算结果的小工具应该不是问题。

许多脚本语言不垃圾收集循环引用是有原因的……对于它们的使用模式，这不是一个实际的问题，因此浪费的资源和浪费的内存一样多。

这个问题已经讨论得令人作呕了。最重要的是，内存泄漏是一个bug，必须修复。如果第三方库泄露了内存，就会让人怀疑它还有什么问题，不是吗?如果你要造一辆汽车，你会使用一个偶尔漏油的发动机吗?毕竟，引擎是别人做的，所以这不是你的错，你不能修，对吧?