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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: About memory allocation failures....
From:       Kuba Ober <kuba () mareimbrium ! org>
Date:       2002-02-04 17:51:08
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On Monday 28 January 2002 06:02 pm, Carsten Pfeiffer wrote:
> On Montag, 28. Januar 2002 18:53, Schmidt, John wrote:
> > Testing the return on malloc SHOULD be a given.
I would like to see a good test case when you actually get that zero return 
value for reasonably-sized malloc's (I'm not talking of multimegabyte things, 
the usual tens-to-tens-of-thousands of bytes range). Did you ever get that 
damned zero, and was able (your app was able) to do anything about it - 
actually displaying a dialog box, or cleaning up nicely, or anything?????

> > Here's something good to dump (or NOT)... the amount of memory allocated
> > by the KDE process(es)...
>
> AFAIK, the C++ standard says that new should never return 0L, instead it
> should throw a bad_alloc exception. So checking for 0L might work on some
> compilers, but is hardly reliable.

Couldn't agree less.

An extension to that is that in many low-memory situation, the C/C++ library 
will never get to return that 0L: it will get killed by the OOM killer first, 
quite possibly, or will just be swapped out for a very long time (since 
during low-memory conditions you get a lot of swap thrashing, and things take 
ages anyway).

Cheerz, Kuba
 
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