Freeing

Is there any real point in freeing memory these days? And I don't mean freeing memory for things that constantly grow and shrink in size. I mean freeing that one array that you malloc at the beginning of the program and you need it until the end of the program. What is the benefit of freeing it when it will be automatically freed by the operating system?

>>42
Oh dear.

A program should reasonably expect that its memory is inaccessible to other users, no matter how or when the access attempt is made.
a program should expect that anything it leaves in memory is accessible to anyone. any program that fails to handle it's own sensitive data properly is insecure. pretending all data is sensitive and having the operating system take care of it makes the operating system slow as fuck. having programs take care of their own sensitive data works much better.

>>42
This is why you overwrite sensitive data with random bytes after you no longer need it.