[_delirium]

Adding some kind of arena-allocation library to both the build & runtime dependencies solely to keep valgrind happy, with no actual improvement in functionality or performance, doesn't seem like a great tradeoff on the software engineering front. I'd rather see work on improving the static analysis. For example if some memory is intended to be freed at program cleanup, Valgrind could have some way of being told, "this is intended to be freed at program cleanup". Inserting an explicit (and redundant) deallocation as the last line of the program just to make the static analyzer happy is a bit perverse.

(That is, assuming that you don't need portability to odd systems that don't actually free memory on process exit.)

[andreasvc]

I don't see why you assume arenas would be added "solely to keep valgrind happy". Arenas have better performance when allocating a high number of small chunks, because an arena can make better performance trade-offs for this use case than the general malloc allocator.