Should I free allocated memory on abnormal termination?

Question

My program (a text-mode web browser) is dynamically allocating memory.

I do free unneeded blocks during runtime, of course. And I do free everything before normal termination - so that memory leak checkers won't give me false positives (and to be flexible should major refactorings ever become needed).

Now, what I do not do is freeing memory before abnormal termination. (Currently, my program terminates on signals and after failed mallocs/reallocs.)

My question is: Do you consider this bad style? Should I free on abnormal termination?

Answer 1

No. I think it's perfectly acceptable to simply throw up your hands and let the OS reclaim the memory after the program terminates. I think if this is truly an abnormal situation and the intention is to have the program terminate, then a well-behaved program should simply clean up any disk resources/locks, and exit as quickly as possible.

Answer 2

In my opinion freeing the memory on crash isn't necessary. When your process terminates, OS will reclaim the memory, so all you have to do is exit.

On the other hand, other resources (e.g. open files) should be closed or at least flushed -- if not, they may not be stored/stored incomplete because of the buffering.