> perhaps i've been unclear. i don't have any problem dealing with failed > alloc. malloc has always been able to return 0. > > dealing with a page fault due to overcommit is a different story.
that's a slightly different aspect. the note should not be "page fault" but "out of memory" (or some such thing). that's much better than a nil return. most errors on shared resoruces are better expressed as exceptions (notes), because that's what they are: they are a failure of the underlying physical or virtual machine to handle an exceptional case. the code shouldn't have to deal with it explicitly everywhere, except in C to detect and propagate the exception to code that knows what's going on. exceptions have acquired a bad name in some circles because of the way that some people tried to use them for situations, usually in interfaces, that are hardly exceptional (eg, Ada and Java).
