> For small short lived scripts and applications, do we even need to free any memory these days? ..we can just exit normally and let the OS handle the clean up.

> For small short lived scripts and applications, do we even need to free any memory these days? ..we can just exit normally and let the OS handle the clean up. That makes me think: why couldn't larger programs be composed of many such small, short-lived scripts/processes that give up all allocated memory upon exit? I suppose there could be accumulated overhead for starting many such processes, and also the issue of allowing shared memory spaces that are explicitly not automatically freed. I'm way out of my depth in this line of thinking though, so, just speculating.