What is the correct way to handle “out of memory”?

Question

Recently, I work on a video player program on Windows for a CCTV program. As the program has to decode and play many videos streams at the same time, I think it might meet

Answer 1

To use the result of malloc without checking for null is unacceptable in code that might be open to use on platforms where malloc can fail, on those it will tend to result in crashes and unpredicatable behaviour. I can't forsee the future, don't know where my code will go, so I would write code with checks for malloc returning null - better to die than behave unpredicatbly!

Strategies for what to do if malloc fails depend upon the kind of applciation and how much confidence you have in the libraries you are using. It some situations the only safe thing to do is halt the whole program.

The idea of preallocating a known quota of memory and parcelling out in some chunks, hence steering clear of actually exhausting the memeory is a good one, if your application's memory usage is predicatable. You can extend this to writing your own memory management routines for use by your code.