> so how on earth did "The system becomes irrecoverably unresponsive if a single application uses too much RAM" get missed? I don't know, there are/were severa

> so how on earth did "The system becomes irrecoverably unresponsive if a single application uses too much RAM" get missed? I don't know, there are/were several similar issues (very basic situations, frequently encountered by everyone or at least many people) which are/were not fixed for years (we might say decade(s)): that one dealing with memory exhaustion; then right after that, the problem which follows when memory is freed but the system is still unresponsive for several minutes(!); freezing when writing to a USB disk; freezing when something goes wrong on a NFS mount... I never understood why those common and really important issues were not tackled (or not tackled before many, many years). IMO they were such basic functionalities, which a proper OS is expected to perform reliably as a basis for and before all the rest, it should have been dealt with and granted highest priority.