TECHNICALLY, a programmer shouldn't rely on the OS to do any-
thing. The OS isn't required to reclaim lost memory in this fashion.

In practice, however, from what I understand, at least the NT
versions of Windows do reclaim memory to the best of their
ability. Most modern operating systems do -- including most
flavors of unix -- from what I remember. I think [but I could be
wrong] that the Windows9x/ME OS's don't have this improved
memory cleanup strategy and will allow leaks a lot more readily.

I think it's a very poor practice to use malloc/new without calling
free/delete. If the memory's going to get reclaimed anyway as
the article claims, what harm can there be from explicitly
deallocating when you need to? There's no such thing as a free
lunch and if memory's going to be deallocated, it'll have to be
deallocated when the program's completed too in their argument.
Maybe if the OS "reclaims" memory faster than free does then
you'll see increased performance; this technique won't help you
with any program that must remain running for any long period of
time, however, so I'd recommend you use free/delete.

--Paul