> As for the "memory leaks" --- I haven't looked at the source, but something whose runtime is very short-lived, like pkg-config, may be very well justified in

> As for the "memory leaks" --- I haven't looked at the source, but something whose runtime is very short-lived, like pkg-config, may be very well justified in allocating and never freeing, letting the process exit itself be the "ultimate free". But sometimes the code grows and what was once a stand-alone executable is about to become a component in a larger executable. With C++ you get a correct component out of the box (if you use RAII consistently), but with C you have to audit all of the code and clean up the leaks.