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in Go ‘new’ is a function, not a keyword

I think that parent probably refers to the lack of something like this:

x := new MyType

This requires an exception mechanism to handle allocation failure. This issue pervades C++ when exceptions are disabled. Important error handling goes unhandled.

How does Go handle allocation failure? In my understanding objects may be allocated on the stack or heap per the compiler's whims. If a heap allocation fails, you just get "fatal error: runtime: out of memory" and an abort.

Your understanding is correct. That's also what you will effectively get with C or C++ on Linux anywhere you would have had a choice between C++ and Go to behind with.

Since when do heap allocation failures on Linux result in an abort? In C, malloc(3) will return NULL on failure and set errno accordingly. Sure, if overcommit is enabled, you might get a fault if you try to access memory that was allegedly allocated, but there is no strict "malloc failure === fatal error" relationship.

malloc never fails on normal Linux configurations except in very rare instances not applicable to this discussion (e.g. allocating a single structure larger than your virtual memory space).

> if overcommit is enabled

This is the case on ~all systems.

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