edit: actually xmalloc and xfree are defined as

#define xmalloc ruby_xmalloc #define xfree ruby_xfree

It's fairly common to define malloc and free wrappers called xmalloc and xfree. The usual idiomatic thing to do is to have xmalloc check the return value of malloc and terminate the program if it ever fails, though this is traditionally done in application code rather than a library. I doubt libc would ever add an xmalloc function because it'd break all the code that defined its own xmalloc.