[Farmadupe]

GP might have been referring to undefined/invalid behaviour (whether in the language or in some OS syscall or whatever). After the demons came out of your nose you can never fix the problem, so there is no point trying to handle the error.

Otherwise I agree with you, that library code should not fail/crash/exit(1) just because of some judgement about recoverability, and out to clean up after itself before passing control back to the caller. If the user wants to fix some ENOSPC deep in my library by shelling out to "rm -rf /" and then trying again, that's fine by me, and this should be reflected in the API.

[groestl]

GP might have meant undefined behavior, but specifically mentioned stack overflows and out of bounds array access as unrecoverable errors. These sound brutal, but are in fact all but undefined. Proper handling is expected in the large class of applications which run as servers.