There are a lot of situations where allocating is not acceptable (e.g.: critical applications that don't heap-allocate in order to ensure they never OOM). Of c

There are a lot of situations where allocating is not acceptable (e.g.: critical applications that don't heap-allocate in order to ensure they never OOM). Of course, we could have just getenvdup() which does what you just said. Let each application chose which variant is best for them: leaking, or thread-unsafe.