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A comment on When the memory allocator works against you. Parent comment

Re:When the memory allocator works against you by paulddraper on Sunday March 12, 2017 @01:45PM (#13851894)
> Some programs will malloc a huge area and only use a small portion of it, and in this scheme, that memory is "in use." It's also worth noting that most programs don't tolerate malloc failure well at all, and will just crash anyway.

...and it would be absurd for bad programs to eat memory and crash? We must have other programs pay for its sins?

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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by mikeash on Sunday March 12, 2017 @01:59PM (#13851992)
Tha program that hits a malloc failure will not necessarily be the program that ate up all the RAM.
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by tedunangst on Sunday March 12, 2017 @02:09PM (#13852069)
Malloc failure is at least synchronous with the out of memory condition. And if your program has reached a fixed state, it may not even be calling malloc.
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by cturner on Sunday March 12, 2017 @03:30PM (#13852550)
Ot: your flak blog could benefit from a page showing links to all articles. Currently, hard to read beyond 'recent'.
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by tedunangst on Sunday March 12, 2017 @03:36PM (#13852593)
Don't waste your time with the old crap. :)
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by paulddraper on Sunday March 12, 2017 @03:01PM (#13852383)
Sure, but (a) it can handle the malloc failure and (b) it's pretty easy for the user to find the bad guy.
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by deathanatos on Sunday March 12, 2017 @05:50PM (#13853337)
It might handle the malloc failure by crashing. Some languages (e.g., Rust) and runtimes (e.g., glib) presume that small allocations always succeed; a failure in such an allocation immediately crashes the program (as the underlying API provides no means to report the failure).
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by steveklabnik on Sunday March 12, 2017 @10:26PM (#13854777)
Rust the language doesn't know anything about allocation; it's entirely a standard library decision.
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by mikeash on Sunday March 12, 2017 @09:19PM (#13854494)
(a) it probably won't therefore (b) the "bad guy" is going to be most/all processes.
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Re:When the memory allocator works against you by __s on Sunday March 12, 2017 @03:08PM (#13852412)
The OOM killer doesn't pick the process by an entirely random method, it seeks to kill the problem
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