Is “Out Of Memory” A Recoverable Error?

Question

I\'ve been programming a long time, and the programs I see, when they run out of memory, attempt to clean up and exit, i.e. fail gracefully. I can\'t remember the last time

Answer 1

No. An out of memory error from the GC is should not generally be recoverable inside of the current thread. (Recoverable thread (user or kernel) creation and termination should be supported though)

Regarding the counter examples: I'm currently working on a D programming language project which uses NVIDIA's CUDA platform for GPU computing. Instead of manually managing GPU memory, I've created proxy objects to leverage the D's GC. So when the GPU returns an out of memory error, I run a full collect and only raise an exception if it fails a second time. But, this isn't really an example of out of memory recovery, it's more one of GC integration. The other examples of recovery (caches, free-lists, stacks/hashes without auto-shrinking, etc) are all structures that have their own methods of collecting/compacting memory which are separate from the GC and tend not to be local to the allocating function. So people might implement something like the following:

T new2(T)( lazy T old_new ) {
    T obj;
    try{
        obj = old_new;
    }catch(OutOfMemoryException oome) {
        foreach(compact; Global_List_Of_Delegates_From_Compatible_Objects)
            compact();
        obj = old_new;
    }
    return obj;
}

Which is a decent argument for adding support for registering/unregistering self-collecting/compacting objects to garbage collectors in general.