But is failing to clean up transient resources that are only allocated for the duration of one function (or block) really a big problem with C? These tend to b

But is failing to clean up transient resources that are only allocated for the duration of one function (or block) really a big problem with C? These tend to be the easiest ones to handle (but admittedly a bit annoying & verbose without defer) and spot if missing. (Also: static analyzers are relatively good at pointing out resources leaked in a single function.) I think most of my functions that allocate a resource only release it on error; otherwise the allocated resource lives on and gets freed later by another function. Defer doesn't help at all here. It just helps with the trivial ones..