Re:The Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low mem...
by notacoward on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @10:40AM
(#20625555)
> Few programs can handle a fail return from "malloc"
Fewer than should, that's for sure, but hardly a trivial number. A lot of old-school C programs are very careful about this, and would handle such a failure passably well. Unfortunately, just about every other language tends to achieve greater "expressiveness" by making it harder to check for allocation failure. How many constructors were invoked by this line of code? By this simple manipulation of a list, map, or other collection type? How many hidden memory allocations did those involve? I'm not saying such expressiveness is a bad thing, but it does make memory-correctness more difficult and so most programmers won't even try.
As the world moves more and more toward "higher level" languages, returning an error from malloc becomes a less and less viable strategy. Might as well just terminate immediately, since "most frequent requester is most likely to die" is better than 99% of the OOM-killer configurations I've ever seen.
Fewer than should, that's for sure, but hardly a trivial number. A lot of old-school C programs are very careful about this, and would handle such a failure passably well. Unfortunately, just about every other language tends to achieve greater "expressiveness" by making it harder to check for allocation failure. How many constructors were invoked by this line of code? By this simple manipulation of a list, map, or other collection type? How many hidden memory allocations did those involve? I'm not saying such expressiveness is a bad thing, but it does make memory-correctness more difficult and so most programmers won't even try.
As the world moves more and more toward "higher level" languages, returning an error from malloc becomes a less and less viable strategy. Might as well just terminate immediately, since "most frequent requester is most likely to die" is better than 99% of the OOM-killer configurations I've ever seen.