If you have time, can you expound on this? Is there, perhaps, an open source project that handles NULL returns from malloc in this way you could point me to?
My first instinct is to say look at something kernel-related. If an allocation fails, taking down the entire system is usually not an option (or not a good one anyway). Searching http://lxr.linux.no/ for "kmalloc" you see a lot of callers handling failure.
Adding a bit more after the fact: most well-written libraries in C are also like this. It's not a library's business to decide to exit the process at any time. The library doesn't know if it's some long-running process that absolutely must keep going, for example.