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

Especially in garbage collected environments, it's quote likely that if you catch the OutOfMemory error at a high level of the application, lots of stuff has gone out of scope and can be reclaimed to give you back memory.

In the case of single excessive allocations, the app may be able to continue working flawlessly. Of course, if you have a gradual memory leak, you'll just run into the problem again (more likely sooner than later), but it's still a good idea to give the app a chance to go down gracefully, save unsaved changes in the case of a GUI app, etc.