the purpose/pattern is to ignore deallocation when the program finishes -- not during runtime. If you have 30MB of space, and your program will only ever use 20

the purpose/pattern is to ignore deallocation when the program finishes -- not during runtime. If you have 30MB of space, and your program will only ever use 20MB, why bother? You only need to care when you're at risk of OOM'ing during runtime. If you're generating too much garbage, you either need to start cleaning up after yourself, or you need to generate less of it -- but it doesn't matter which choice you take from the perspective of the OS or the server-less function. The only reason I can think of for server-less to impact the validity of this pattern is from it's lower memory capacity -- but otherwise it's the same constraints. And anyways, it's probably not nice to generate a few GB of garbage even if the user has the space