Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

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Talking as a long time C++ programmer. I really don't get this mind set.

First off allocation failure (typically indicated by bad_alloc exception in C++ code, or nullptr in C style code) does not mean that the system (or even the process) as a whole is out of memory.

It just means that this particular allocator could not satisfy the allocation request. The allocator could have "ulimit" or such limit that is completely independent from actual process/system limitations.

Secondarily what reason is there to make an allocation failure any different than any other resource allocation failure?

A normal structure for a program is to catch these exceptions at a higher level in the stack close to some logical entry point, such as thread entry point, UI action handler etc. where they can be understood and possibly shown to the user or logged or whatever. It shouldn't really matter if the failure is about failing to allocate socket or failing to allocate memory.

You could make the case that if the system is out of memory the exception propagation itself is going to fail. Maybe..but IMHO on the code path that is taken when stack is unwound due to exception you should only release resources not allocate more anyway.

In rust you could use multiple allocators at the same time. Allocation failure handled by allocator, converting panic to some useful behavior. This logic is observable in WASM, as there are OOMs all the time, which handled transparently to application code

So I assume there is no real blockers as people in this tread assume, this is just not a conventional behavior, ad hoc, so we need to wait and well defined stable OOM handlers will appear

>does not mean that the system is out of memory. >"The allocator could have "ulimit" or such limit that is completely independent from actual process/system limitations."

Are we playing word games here? If a process has a set amount of memory, and it's out of it, then that process is OOM, if a VM is out of memory, it's OOM. Yes, OOM is typically used for OS OOM, and Linus is talking about rust in the kernel, so that's what OOM would mean.

>Secondarily what reason is there to make an allocation failure any different than any other resource allocation failure.

Of course there is, would you treat being out of bread similar to being out of oxygen? Again this can be explained by the context being kernel development and not application development.

"Are we playing word games here? If a process has a set amount of memory, and it's out of it, then that process is OOM, if a VM is out of memory, it's OOM. Yes, OOM is typically used for OS OOM, and Linus is talking about rust in the kernel, so that's what OOM would mean."

As I just explained an allocator can have its own limits.

A process can have multiple allocators. There's no direct logical step that says that because some allocator some failed some allocation, the process itself cannot allocate more ever.

"Of course there is, would you treat being out of bread similar to being out of oxygen? Again this can be explained by the context being kernel development and not application development."

The parent comment is talking about over commitment and OOM as if these are situations that are completely out of the programs control. They aren't.

I am not well-versed in this area but have a doubt - when the OS sends a SIGKILL to a process because it has run of memory for it how can the program catch that before it is killed and deal with it "gracefully"? Does C provide any mechanism to deal with such scenario?

There are several levels here.

In your C++ (or C) program you have one (or more) allocators. These are just pieces of code that juggle blocks of memory into smaller chunks for the program to use. Typically the allocators get their memory from the OS in pages using some OS system call such as sbrk or mmap.

For the sake of argument, let's say I write an allocator that has a limit of 2MiB, while my system has 64Gib or RAM. The allocator can then fail some request when it's internal 2MiB has been exhausted. In C world it'd return a nullptr. In C++ world it would normally throw bad_alloc.

If this happens does this mean the process is out of memory? Or the system is out of memory? No, it doesn't.

That being said where things get murky is because there are allocators that in the absence of limits will just map more and more pages from the OS. The OS can "overcommit" which is to say it gives out more pages than can actually fit into the available physical memory (after taking into account what the OS itself uses etc). And when the overall system memory demand grows too high it will just kill some arbitrary process. On Linux this is the infamous OOM killer that uses the "niceness" score to determine what to kill.

And yes, for the OOM killer there's very little you can do.

But an allocation failure (nullptr or bad_alloc) does not mean OOM condition is happening in the system.

None of that matters: what is your application going to do if it tries to allocate 3mb of data from your 2mb allocator?

This is the far more meaningful part of the original comment:

> and furthermore most code is not in a position to do anything other than crash in an OOM scenario

Given that (unlike a language such as Zig) Rust doesn’t use a variety of different allocator types within a given system, choosing to reliably panic with a reasonable message and stack/trace is a very reasonable mindset to have.

Since we're talking about SQLite, by far the most memory it allocates is for the page cache.

If some allocation fails, the error bubbles up until a safe place, where some pages can be dropped from the cache, and the operation that failed can be tried again.

All this requires is that bubbling up this specific error condition doesn't allocate. Which SQLite purportedly tests.

I'll note that this is not entirely dissimilar to a system where an allocation that can't be immediately satisfied triggers a full garbage collection cycle before an OOM is raised (and where some data might be held through soft/weak pointers and dropped under pressure), just implemented in library code.

Sure, and this is completely sensible to do in a library.

But that’s not the point: what can most applications do when SQLite tells them that it encountered a memory error and couldn’t complete the transaction?

Abort and report an error to the user. In a CLI this would be a panic/abort, and in a service that would usually be implemented as a panic handler (which also catches other errors) that attempts to return an error response.

In this context, who cares if it’s an OOM error or another fatal exception? The outcome is the same.

Of course that’s not universal, but it covers 99% of use cases.

The topic is whether Rust should be used to re-implement SQLite.

If SQLite fails to allocate memory for a string or blob, it bubbles up the error, frees some data, and maybe tries again.

Your app may be "hopeless" if the error bubbles up all the way to it, that's your choice, but SQLite may have already handled the error internally, retried, and given your answer without you noticing.

Or it may at least have rolled back your transaction cleanly, instead of immediately crashing at the point of the failed allocation. And although crashing should not corrupt your database, a clean rollback is much faster to recover from, even if your app then decides to crash.

Your app, e.g. an HTTP server, might decide to drop the request, maybe close that SQLite connection, and stay alive to handle other ongoing and new requests.

SQLite wants to be programmed in a language were a failed allocation doesn't crash, and unlike most other code, SQLite is actually tested for how it behaves when malloc fails.

In C++ it will throw an exception which you can catch, and then gracefully report that the operation exceeded limits and/or perform some fallback.

Historically, a lot of C code fails to handle memory allocation failure properly because checking malloc etc for null result is too much work — C code tends to calm that a lot.

Bjarne Stroustrup added exceptions to C++ in part so that you could write programs that easily recover when memory allocation fails - that was the original motivation for exceptions.

In this one way, rust is a step backwards towards C. I hope that rust comes up with a better story around this, because in some applications it does matter.

I may be getting SIGKILL and SIGABORT mixed up, but one of them is not sent to the process, rather it's sent to the OS.

If it were any other way then processes could ignore signals and just make themselves permanent, like Maduro or Putin.

> Are we playing word games here?

No. A single process can have several allocators, switch between them, or use temporary low limits to enforce some kind of safety. None of that has any relation to your system running out of memory.

You won't see any of that in a desktop or a server. In fact, I haven't seen people even discuss that in decades. But it exists, and there are real reasons to use it.

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