Yes, the reasons you mention are why I would always free pre-malloced memory. However, a real memory leak, to me, is memory that gets allocated at different ti

Yes, the reasons you mention are why I would always free pre-malloced memory. However, a real memory leak, to me, is memory that gets allocated at different times through the lifetime of the app and doesn't get reliably freed do to unexpected code paths or race conditions. If I don't see the allocation count rise steadily while I run my app I'm not as worried.