Re: Completion of error handling

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 2, 2010, 19:49 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b131002021149g6ffe703erd9e25621e4305a52@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4B688042.8090400@web.de>

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Markus Elfring <Markus.Elfring@web.de> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Nicolas wrote:
>> At least on Linux, most of those functions simply cannot fail.
>
> Would you like to support software environments that work without a
> famous out-of-memory killer?

In many cases on Linux systems, you don't get the OOM notification anyway until you try to *use* the memory, not at allocation time. So even checking the results of malloc() won't always save you (although *not* checking can make problems even worse).

However, for functions that can't allocate memory at all, it's extra pointless to worry about.

>> There is just no dynamic memory allocation involved.
>
> I find this opinion strange.

This isn't an opinion; because it's open source, you can actually look at the source code and find out that many system calls don't do memory allocation at all.

Avery