This has little to to do with C language. Every programming language that allocates dynamic memory from the operating system via syscall has to deal with it. I

This has little to to do with C language. Every programming language that allocates dynamic memory from the operating system via syscall has to deal with it. In Linux you can use sysctl ´vm.overcommit_memory´ to make the OS do what you want. There are three options: 0 = The default is heuristic overcommit handling. 1 = Always overcommit. Good choice for many data heavy science applications that use gigantic sparse arrays. 2 = No overcommit. Only swap + tunable amount (default is 50%) of physical RAM available. Then allocation fails.