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

If you are really out of memory you are doomed, since you can not free anything anymore.

If you are out of memory, but something like a garbage collector can kick in and free up some memory you are non dead yet.

The other problem is fragmentation. Although you might not be out of memory (fragmented), you might still not be able to allocate the huge chunk you wanna have.