[pcwalton]

> The existing failure-oblivious APIs need to be explicitly deprecated.

That's total overkill. For 99% of applications, process abort is fine, and dealing with it is just noise. Those 1% are usually things like kernels that use custom standard libraries anyway.

We're not doing the 99% a favor by making them think about OOM every time they do something that might allocate.

> The only ways to redeem Rust is to either support exceptions as first-class citizens with mandatory runtime support or to convert all existing allocating stdlib functions to return Result and mark all the existing failure-oblivious ones as being as deprecated as gets(3) in C.

This is silly hyperbole. Ask anyone who works in security whether the danger of xmalloc() is comparable to the danger of gets(). In fact, I've seen many security folks recommend only using xmalloc() with process abort instead of trying to explicitly handle OOM failures!