[enriquto]

> debugging leaks is ~hopeless unless you have the ability to prune “intentional leaks” at exit

Not in general. It depends on your debugger. For example, valgrind distinguishes between harmless "visible leaks", memory blocks allocated from main or on global variables, and "true leaks" that you cannot free anymore. The first ones are given a simple warning by the leak detector, while the true leaks are actual errors.