Nonsense. Well, it depends. Writing a Minecraft clone? Yeah, you can probably just give up. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking for failure. Check,

Nonsense. Well, it depends. Writing a Minecraft clone? Yeah, you can probably just give up. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking for failure. Check, if failed, pop up a message, log something, and die. However, not all applications are created equal. If I'm writing a (for example) safety critical piece of code then I may not have the luxury of just exiting (I may not be using dynamic memory allocation at all either, but that's neither here nor there.) It may be more beneficial to my users (or absolutely required) to attempt to recover. Not all software can just exit on a whim, but obviously this is a small portion of the software that exists.