> On the modern desktop, where programmers don't care about failing malloc(), disabling overcommit is shooting yourself in the foot. As you can observe, the memory allocations start failing long before the memory is exhausted.
If a memory allocations fails with strict mode then you'll get a null pointer returns and some kind of crash or panic (in code that doesn't handle it properly).
If it fails with the default mode the whole process will get killed by the OS. Is that really much better?
I don't think it's as simple as that. Killing a program can have unintended consequences too, e.g. corrupting files they were in the middle of writing.
> On the modern desktop, where programmers don't care about failing malloc(), disabling overcommit is shooting yourself in the foot. As you can observe, the memory allocations start failing long before the memory is exhausted.