In the old days, if the system couldn't satisfy a memory allocation request, the malloc function in the C library would return NULL and the application would re

In the old days, if the system couldn't satisfy a memory allocation request, the malloc function in the C library would return NULL and the application would respond accordingly. These days, if the system can't satisfy a memory request, it perversely returns a pointer to nowhere in the hope that the application won't try to use it. There's no portable way for an application to distinguish between usable and unusable pointers, and even if there were, the system could decide later that it has given away too much memory and therefore must repossess it by killing applications at random. (Don't get me started on "memory safety" in languages that ignore finiteness of the heap.) Yes, I know it's possible to configure a kernel like the old days, but then it better be on a dedicated server because otherwise desktop applications that have come to rely on this behavior would get flaky.