At some point you have to start being precise about what you mean by memory leak -- how explicit does your code have to be in how it burns its way through memor

At some point you have to start being precise about what you mean by memory leak -- how explicit does your code have to be in how it burns its way through memory? A strictly evaluated functional language (if not a language that lacks dynamic allocation entirely) will have no cycles, but you could still blow through memory with infinite recursion. Suppose you prohibit non-tail-call recursion. You could still write code that grows a list as it executes other logic. But it's hard to do so "accidentally."