You are arguing for a solution which works "99% of the time" and then argue that my solution does not work for programs which only leak on Thursdays. Smart poi

You are arguing for a solution which works "99% of the time" and then argue that my solution does not work for programs which only leak on Thursdays. Smart pointers won't fix all your memory leaks either due to cyclic references. Any program that runs for 3 weeks should be built to handle restarts, and have a failover architecture in place.