[steveklabnik]

> This is an interesting case for error-handling, because

I think this is a very good articulation of this space, thank you.

> It feels like a workaround.

I agree, but the needed work to improve this has taken a very, very, very long time, and so I think workarounds are ultimately helpful. We'll get there...

[brundolf]

I think it can honestly be traced down to just how wide a stretch of usecases Rust itself has managed to span. For systems, this arguably is "something you always want to explicitly handle", whereas for applications it's almost always "something where you just want to abort". The level of abstraction is very different, but a single language is spanning both. Or, more precisely, a single standard library.

Just spitballing: maybe one solution could be an alternate set of standard primitives, specifically for low-level work, that do return a Result for everything that might trigger OOM? Maybe those could be abstracted out of the current standard library, and the existing ("application-level") APIs could wrap them with a panic?

[pixel_fcker]

This is AFAICT essentially what wg-allocators is working on where you can directly specify an allocator in collections (and alloc() returns a Result): https://github.com/TimDiekmann/alloc-wg

From the readme it sounds like this has actually started to be upstreamed now?