Is "Out of Memory" a recoverable error?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

"Walter Bright" wrote
>I asked this over on stackoverflow.com to see what people using other 
>languages have to say, as well as the D community. The reason I ask is to 
>see if memory allocation can be allowed in functions marked "nothrow".
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/333736/is-out-of-memory-a-recoverable-error

It can be.  For example, if you want to allocate a gigantic buffer to see if 
you can load a file, you may catch for failure, and display an appropriate 
message to the user on failure.  The application could still continue to 
run.  I think the difference between recoverable and non-recoverable is the 
size of the allocation.  If the size is sufficiently large enough, you can 
still have memory to deal with the failure.  If allocating 16 bytes gives 
you a failure, then may not be able to do much to get around it.

In most cases, an out of memory failure is a non-recoverable error.  My 
thoughts are, add a recoverable allocate function to the GC.  If one wants a 
recoverable memory error, he must call that function to allocate.  Don't 
allow that function in nothrow functions, but allow standard (non 
recoverable) memory allocation to be called.

-Steve