[jclulow]

> No non-embedded libc will actually return NULL

This is just a Linux ecosystem thing. Other full size operating systems do memory accounting differently, and are able to correctly communicate when more memory is not available.

[johncolanduoni]

There are functions on many C allocators that are explicitly for non-trivial allocation scenarios, but what major operating system malloc implementation returns NULL? MSVC’s docs reserve the right to return NULL, but the actual code is not capable of doing so (because it would be a security nightmare).

[qhwudbebd]

I hack on various C projects on a linux/musl box, and I'm pretty sure I've seen musl's malloc() return 0, although possibly the only cases where I've triggered that fall into the 'unreasonably huge' category, where a typo made my enormous request fail some sanity check before even trying to allocate.

[throw0101c]

> There are functions on many C allocators that are explicitly for non-trivial allocation scenarios, but what major operating system malloc implementation returns NULL?

Solaris (and FreeBSD?) have overcommitting disabled by default.