I think I even prefaced the word 'people' with 'smart' :-). But, yeah, I completely agree that we're both right which is why the guidance is to establish a policy on what to do when the programmer screws up rather than doing either A or B. I brought this up mostly to address the popular misconception that libdbus-1 is an evil library that eats babies - it's not.
(Btw, another misconception is that libdbus-1 is meant for applications to use; it's really not, it's more intended for a base that you can build language/toolkit bindings on top + the implementation used to implement dbus-daemon(1) which MUST be able to handle OOM.)
Posted Jun 30, 2011 21:12 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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If it's a base that you can build language bindings on top of, then the libdbus-1 authors have even *less* idea than they might have as to what the process is doing, and it's even more critical that it should never die. (But it is true that a lot of Great Big Languages have no hope of handling OOM errors: dynamic allocation is too fundamental to them. However, for others this same property is a benefit, because they often have a lot of dynamically-allocated storage that they can get rid of, and even their own allocators so they can be sure the storage finds its way back to the OS again.)