The call to gs_c_param_list_release() in zfunc4.c introduced in rev. 289aa28f46e2be1c87c34d44ee86dec41e87506b causes VM warnings, when gs is tested with this command line: gs '-Z?@$' -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf foo.ps The sample file can can be found here: http://bugs.ghostscript.com/attachment.cgi?id=9033 Release build of current gs fails with a SEGV. Debug build just displays warnings. Removal of this line clears all problems in all revisions I've tried. In general, constructing a copy of the parameter list just to accessing a boolean flag seems rather inefficient. Re-doing this for every looping operator in the function is even less efficient.
The performance problem is addressed with commit c74e146b74fe6db9f3a91ff71b7478dac79b5c1a I believe the memory problem is nothing to do with gs_c_param_list_release, but is fixed in commit 23666d2037f14a1ef880e60bce9008203e502436 see the log for details.