[steveklabnik]

> Yes that is one of the primary failures of Rust at the moment: to my knowledge it currently has no good way to safely manage allocation failures

So, sort of yes and sort of no.

The data structures that allocate in the standard library do not let you handle allocation failure. However, if you write your own, the global allocator lets you determine if failure happened, and then you can do whatever you want with it.

[rectang]

I think Rust got it right, here.

Dealing with allocation failure gracefully is hard and requires a lot of extra code.

For most applications the best default is to panic and handle it up the stack rather than pay the programming overhead of handling allocation failure explicitly in every last nook and cranny. The Rust standard library rightly optimizes for this use case.

For the embedded or critical-safety application spaces, where you really do want to handle allocation failure gracefully, you need something other than the standard library. Letting that "something" develop slowly out in the community is a good call.