The question is tagged "language-agnostic", but it's difficult to answer without considering the language and/or the underlying system. (I see several toher hadns
If memory allocation is implicit, with no mechanism to detect whether a given allocation succeeded or not, then recovering from an out-of-memory condition may be difficult or impossible.
For example, if you call a function that attempts to allocate a huge array, most languages just don't define the behavior if the array can't be allocated. (In Ada this raises a Storage_Error
exception, at least in principle, and it should be possible to handle that.)
On the other hand, if you have a mechanism that attempts to allocate memory and is able to report a failure to do so (like C's malloc()
or C++'s new
), then yes, it's certainly possible to recover from that failure. In at least the cases of malloc()
and new
, a failed allocation doesn't do anything other than report failure (it doesn't corrupt any internal data structures, for example).
Whether it makes sense to try to recover depends on the application. If the application just can't succeed after an allocation failure, then it should do whatever cleanup it can and terminate. But if the allocation failure merely means that one particular task cannot be performed, or if the task can still be performed more slowly with less memory, then it makes sense to continue operating.
A concrete example: Suppose I'm using a text editor. If I try to perform some operation within the editor that requires a lot of memory, and that operation can't be performed, I want the editor to tell me it can't do what I asked and let me keep editing. Terminating without saving my work would be an unacceptable response. Saving my work and terminating would be better, but is still unnecessarily user-hostile.