On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Horst von Brand wrote:
> Brian Hurt <bhurt@talkware.net> said:
> > One thing I find disturbing about this whole debate is the assumption that
> > the only valid response a program can make to running out of memory is to
> > crash- and that it doesn't matter if the crash is a SEGV or a more
> > controlled cleanup & exit.
>
> Very few programs do controlled cleanup & exit today, those that do will do
> so regardless. And if they run OOM (due to overcommitment that can't be
> met, user quota, rlimit, system isn't overallocating and ran out, or
> whatever), they won't be able to do anything much about it anyway.
Most programs suck: they're written by programmers who, due to ignorance
or lack of time, don't check for errors they should. The fact that brk(),
sbrk(), and malloc() all can return errors is irrelevent- they aren't
checked. Is this an excuse to not return an error value? Even something
as simple as popping up a dialog box (which CAN be done- WindowMaker does
it) instead of simply dying quietly (and leaving a core file behind- the
default behavior of SIGSEGV) improves the user experience enormously.
Brian
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