[htns]

I'm having a hard time picturing a situation where it would be tough to figure out. Typically you allocate memory to use it right after. errno will be set too.

Of course, there is no reason to not do all your allocation through a wrapper function which does check and abort on failure. I think the point was that surviving malloc failures is a dubious approach - instead go all in, or if it's a long-running service, provide a configurable max memory cap and assume that much will be available.

[deathanatos]

In one scenario, the process writes "Out of memory." or similar to stderr. In the other, it segfaults. Maybe.

I'll take the clear error message.

[yaur]

In the case of my day job (CCTV application 80% C#, 20% C and C++) writing to a bad pointer will get reported as an AccessViolationException with no hope of getting a dump or a stack trace of the native code. An allocation failure will get translated into an OutOfMemoryException and typically includes stats of what is consuming RAM.