[nemothekid]

Because there are legitimate reasons why memory can be allocated. This is like calling your OS cache a memory leak when you open up Task Manager and see you only have 400MB free. A memory leak implies memory that is lost for good and it no longer being kept track of.

Consider it this way - if I had a program that connected to a database and used a connection pool to improve performance, would it be a "connection leak" that 5 connections were opened even though the database was idle?

The framing here is similar - Rust, in an attempt to improve performance reused large memory allocations. Some applications do this on purpose and call it buffer pools.

[Dylan16807]

Except this memory is not being intentionally used as a cache/buffer.

Rust attempts to keep the vector capacity in a range for that purpose, and failed to do so here.

No matter what, it's a bug. So none of those possible justifications fit, because it's a bug.

For the database analogy, I would call it a connection leak if the number of idle connections greatly exceeded the amount that had ever been simultaneously busy and they weren't actually getting reused.