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Comment by squeek502 | Hacker News Reader

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squeek502·

There's support for exactly this type of OOM testing in Zig via std.testing.checkAllAllocationFailures:

- https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/1606717b5fed83ee64ba1a91...

- https://www.ryanliptak.com/blog/zig-intro-to-check-all-alloc...

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This is a clear sign of a badly designed language. You should never see a fixed-size (less than page size) allocation fail, simply because there's nothing you can reasonably do if it does fail. Either you should crash or it should block until it is possible again.

(Where crash means a worker process or something limited to something less than the entire system. See Erlang for the logical extension of this.)

I realize this implies Windows and Java are badly designed and my answer to that is "yes".

So if my browser tries to allocate memory for a tab and the allocation fails it should just crash or block instead of handling the failure gracefully by not creating a new tab and telling me the system is running low on memory?

Tabs are separate processes in every modern browser.

Actually since you skipped all the less than a page stuff I'm not sure you actually understand what my post is about…?

Is Linux designed in such a way that less-than-page size allocations never fail? How would that work?

As long as the syscalls don't themselves fail, it's no problem until you run out of address space. At which point you should crash because you probably need to allocate to handle any reasonable errors.

So is there no point to checking malloc return ?

Oh cool, didn't know that. Thanks.

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