A particular task may not be recoverable, but the process state can be. Photoshop shouldn't abort just because you pulled the thumb drive you were reading/writi

A particular task may not be recoverable, but the process state can be. Photoshop shouldn't abort just because you pulled the thumb drive you were reading/writing from. A concurrent network server with 9999 connected clients shouldn't abort because malloc failed initializing connection state for the 10000th.[1] This isn't just a QoI issue, it's also a security issue. [1] Many types of network servers, for example a multimedia streaming server or a SOCKS proxy, only need to allocate dynamic memory during the early phase of the connection. After that the client can be served indefinitely. If you're writing a library, best practice is to assume your caller can handle malloc failure; if not they can choose to abort.