[deschutes]

Assuming memory is infinite for the purposes of a program is a very reasonable assumption for the vast majority of programs. In the rare contexts where you need to deal with the allocation failure it comes at a great engineering cost.

It's not really what this is about IMV. The vast majority of unrecoverable errors are simply bugs.

A context free example many will be familiar with is a deadlock condition. The programmer's mental model of the program was incomplete or they were otherwise ignorant. You can't statically eliminate deadlocks in an arbitrary program without introducing more expensive problems. In practice programmers employ a variety of heuristics to avoid them and just fix the bugs when they are detected.

[swiftcoder]

Deadlocks also don’t result in panics in most environments. The problem isn’t so much bugs - those can be found and fixed. The problem is more that no_panic in most languages implies no_alloc, and that eliminates most useful code