Perhaps I'm missing this, but what about the "return failure" policy (for libraries)? If malloc fails, log an error and return a failure to the calling applica

Perhaps I'm missing this, but what about the "return failure" policy (for libraries)? If malloc fails, log an error and return a failure to the calling application. It isn't recovery, since it doesn't attempt to continue working, but it doesn't abort() the whole program (including calling application) either. The calling application can then close the current handle to our library if it chooses (thus freeing up all of the memory again). (This is what our library, x264, does, and IMO makes the most sense when dealing with situations where it would be insane to try to recovery, but in which one doesn't want to kill the calling app as well. We added malloc checking when it became possible to set options that would hit 2GB allocation on a 32-bit system.)