alt Hacker NewsYou might have a limited budget per incoming request in a http server for example. Then you want all of the code that http handler calls to be able to handle an error of type something like OutOfMemory.
This is a very good ability to have in an application like a database.
Such things should be solved in more nice way, not by manually checking every allocation. Like via lightweight threads, with each of them having their own memory and a scheduler, which kills threads exceeding their memory limit.