True, but with some stuff you just ain't gonna need it. For example, chibicc forks a process for each input file. They're all ephemeral. So the fork/_exit model does work well for chibicc. You could compile a thousand files and all its subprocesses would just clean things up. Now needless to say, I have compiled some juicy files with chibicc. Memory does get a bit high. It's manageable though. I imagine it'd be more of an issue if it were a c++ compiler.