Is "Out of Memory" a recoverable error?

[Walter Bright]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> 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.

I should point out that in such cases (probing a large allocation), the 
error recovery is very local. I.e. there's no need for throwing an 
exception and then recovering in some arbitrary user code way up the stack.

> 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.

I think this may be the best strategy.