It's the operating system kernel's job to take care and free all unfreed dynamic memory when a program exits, so I don't really see what the point is here. We don't explicitly free everything at the end, but it makes no difference since Windows, Mac, and Linux are all smart enough to collect the dangling memory. Too many programs out there don't free resources at the end, that it HAS to be an OS feature to make sure resources are returned.

Memory leaks should pretty much only apply during the scope of a program's execution, and then it's entirely the programmer's fault. Not freeing on exit is quite acceptable though.

And essentially any time an error or exception can occur in a program, and it needs to exit, it's very unclear what resources are in memory from the program's perspective. So the responsibilities fall onto the operating system kernel, that can mend everything after a program exits because it knows everything that each and every process is holding onto, so it has full control over the situation.

So you don't need to worry here, really. :D