i3status-2.12 memory leak (2019)

I saw in top that i3status uses 3GiB RAM, after reload the value dropped down to some MiB.
But then it increased again:
$ while true; do top -b | awk '/i3status/ {print $6,$7,$NF}' ; sleep 10; done
110M 18M i3status
111M 18M i3status
111M 18M i3status
112M 18M i3status
112M 18M i3status
113M 18M i3status
113M 18M i3status
114M 19M i3status
114M 19M i3status
114M 19M i3status

I see that this is not the first mention of this problem.
How can I find the root cause? Coverity? Valgrind? Or is there a patch somewhere?
I'm using FreeBSD 12.0

regards,
A