Yes, it would cause existing programs to leak memory. Most of the time these leaks would be fairly minor, but some programs could leak a lot if they call geten

Yes, it would cause existing programs to leak memory. Most of the time these leaks would be fairly minor, but some programs could leak a lot if they call getenv() inside of a loop for some reason. Personally, if the return object is a basic C type, I'm not a fan of creating a wrapper function to call free(). This is one of those code purity things that I don't think buys you anything.