There are circumstances where it's a perfectly valid solution. For example, suppose you're trying to acquire the lock on something to destroy it. It can be the

There are circumstances where it's a perfectly valid solution. For example, suppose you're trying to acquire the lock on something to destroy it. It can be the lesser of two evils just to leak that memory instead of just waiting forever/a very long time to acquire that lock. You just need to ensure that you aren't leaking memory too quickly for whatever your constraints are. For example, most programs wouldn't care about a 1kb/day leak of memory because that would take a very long time to actually become noticeable. Furthermore, there's pretty much always some degree of memory growth just due to heap fragmentation (at least if you're using a language like C which can't do memory compaction via GC).