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That loop doesn't release any of the objects that it creates; the pointer v always hangs on to every cons cell that was created. So there is nothing for the garbage collector to do here other than to confirm that everything is reachable and not actually reclaim anything. If we disable garbage collection, it will hit OOM. Die here, die there.

BTW: (setq v (cons v v)) -> (push v v)

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Whatever it does, I expect Emacs to not crash.

If it cannot allocate more memory, I expect it to throw a Lisp exception that tells me so, not to crash the whole process.

I greatly appreciate Daniel's work to increase the robustness of Emacs, because it means that there will be fewer situations where a process crash leads to lost work for users. In addition, increasing the robustness of Emacs in such cases will also greatly broaden the set of test cases that can be run reliably, and hence help to detect and correct even more issues.

Without a question, if cons cannot allocate, it should throw some exception; the code with its best intentions should be there. That way, someone who can tune their operating system or run on a MMU-less system can take advantage of it. The rest of the people won't actually it though; their system will thrash and either it or they will kill the offending process before it has a chance to reach that exception throw. That's if they don't run out of patience and just reboot the machine.

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