You can easily turn non-leaking program into a faster and leaking program, but the inverse direction is hard, so that criterion is entirely justified. Any optim

You can easily turn non-leaking program into a faster and leaking program, but the inverse direction is hard, so that criterion is entirely justified. Any optimization of this sort should be guarded against a compile time switch that simply swaps `free` with a placeholder. I think CPython did this for a long time, before the global initialization step was completely removed.