No, there's a lock. I meant avoiding too many possible interactions between low-level run-time

functions and the rest of the library. (I'd consider atexit and exit to be lower-level functions than malloc.)

Since atexit is already used by profile, and is called by _profmain, which is called very early on,

putting a call to malloc in that chain means you have to think that much harder about interactions that are already quite subtle.

Note that _profmain allocates its memory directly using sbrk, probably for that reason.

Suppose I later want to add a malloc profiler, can I call atexit to write the results, or not?