A programming language that offers no mechanism to handle memory allocation errors is not a system programming language. I have yet to come to a conclusion on the merits of Rust, but this claim about system programming always ticks me off.
Second, Rust doesn't stop you from handling memory allocation errors. The standard library might fully support failable allocations but that doesn't stop you from using your own collections for that type of work.
Third, this has been an item of interest for a long time in the Rust community and is actively being worked on as part of introducing Rust into Linux.
Being ill-equipped to use or recover from allocation failures in such arenas bodes poorly for a systems language.
I gather there has been some effort to get Rust library components aware of such things. Handling exhaustion in them is an interesting research topic.
"nobody"
~/chromium (main)$ rg --stats -t cpp "[=\(][ ]*new "
...
17639 matches
17536 matched lines
7162 files contained matches
96561 files searched
1539692 bytes printed
763109193 bytes searched
1.119265 seconds spent searching
1.428974 seconds
~/llvm-project (main)$ rg --stats -t cpp "[=\(][ ]*new "
...
7447 matches
7394 matched lines
2245 files contained matches
35148 files searched
541938 bytes printed
385115019 bytes searched
0.425689 seconds spent searching
0.485431 seconds
... which we already knew existed.
In the event you're as desperate for those last dregs of performance as the author of the "Why not rust?" article, (and let's assume you actually measured your performance problem before jumping to the step where you make everything more complicated and more buggy for no good reason?) you can even Box::try_new_uninit_in() and unsafely do all the initialization in place as needed yourself as you might do by default in C++.
Now, I don't know when Allocators will be stabilized, the Working Group has been making steady progress for some years now but this is a tricky business, witness the many languages that get it quite badly wrong...
I hope it wasn't a safety-critical application.
> Rust [...] doesn't stop you from using your own collections for that type or work
and your own replacements for all of their dependances. Remind me why I need Rust again.
> this [...] is actively being worked on
I'm looking forward to learning Rust when it becomes worthwhile. For now it seems that asking about allocation errors in Rust on HN is like asking about nuclear waste disposal for next generation reactors. Answer: never mind about that; look at all the cool safety features.