| It has also created this unfortunate assumption a lot of the time that malloc and friends are (infallible OR crash) and, separately, can sometimes have potentially weird tendencies to force undefined behaviors on otherwise well-defined programs (I think primarily around mmap, although I'm not remembering the details super well). Agreed though, overcommit is the culprit here. I get why it happened (unfortunate consequences of fork and friends existing as the way to spawn tasks and wanting those to be both performant and not fail in frustrating conditions), but I don't think it was a design that aged particularly well. I actually like somewhat the notion of how Windows handles these two things 1. For address space reservations, you can reserve address space but in order to touch it you have to commit it. Commits have to be backed by something (RAM, a file, pagefiles if they exist) and if a commit fails, they'll get NULL back from malloc. It allows code to be more correct in the face of low-memory conditions or to try again later (Firefox for example, does this[1] on Windows). 2. Process creation is done with a specific API to create processes. The only problem with this I think is that you have to specify everything at creation time, but you could augment this by creating processes in a stopped state (iirc Linux has to do this anyway to set up some stuff before it can hand over control back to userland) and having the parent send FDs to the child or whatnot. Windows... doesn't do this, it has a couple of kitchen sink APIs for creating processes and setting up stuff like the standard streams... in any case I'm getting off topic. Don't think there's much about that design that can be changed now though [1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/11/improving-firefox-stabilit... |