> On Linux, somewhat infamously, malloc never fails. It will always return a pointer to some fresh part of the address space. It is able to do this because, in turn, sbrk/anonymous mmap never fails - it always allocates some fresh address space. It is able to do this because Linux does not allocate physical memory (or swap) when it assigns address space, but when that address space is actually used. It will happily allocate more address space than it has memory for - a practice known as 'overcommit'. So, on Linux, you can indeed not worry about malloc failing

True. However, you can disable this behavior if you like by running 'sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=2'; see proc(5).