c - Is it up to the programmer to deallocate on exit()?

Question

I have a program and when I input wrong data from the keyboard it just exits with exit(1).

I was testing with Valgrind and while this happens there are no errors, but I can see that there are still reachable x bytes.

So my question: Is it up to the programmer to free memory before hitting an exit() or is the OS going to take care of it?

Answer 1

It's a good idea (and in old enough versions of Windows, it was essential), but when a program exit()s on modern operating systems its entire address space is reclaimed.