EDIT: Thanks to replies for clarification that it's just one allocator, aborts, and others are available. Still feel weird about it but that's better.

Most programs can't tolerate oom errors, though, and it would be absolutely unreasonable for every function in the standard library that might perform an allocation to return an error that has to be handled by every programmer all the time.

EDIT: C's solution is to make it very easy to ignore oom errors, so most programmers just don't handle oom errors. Rust's solution is much better.

Rust's standard library just isn't designed for writing applications that need to survive oom errors. That's fine, its not designed for a number of other applications which Rust the language is well-suited for either (operating systems, for example). Its designed for the majority use case, because life is full of trade offs.

> The Rust team made conscious design choices in full awareness of the trade-offs

I don't think that anyone who isn't already predisposed to avoid exceptions would consider the tradeoff the Rust people made to be the correct one.

Furthermore, keep in mind that the _pure language_ Rust has no concept of dynamic allocation (apart from "language elements" like __rust_allocate, which are kind of like a pre-linker).

Clarifying note: this is configurable.