[joosters]

From the parent comment:

because of OS-level overcommit, which is nearly always a good thing

It doesn't matter about the language you are writing in, because your OS can tell you that the allocation succeeded, but when you come to use it, only then do you find out that the memory isn't there.

[senko]

Of course it matters, because you (the system admin) can tell your OS not to do that. Which is only helpful if your app knows how to handle the case. Most don't, so overcommit, in general, makes sense.

[gpm]

You can't really on linux. There's no way to do sparse allocations then because when you turn off overcommit MAP_NORESERVE still reserves memory...

It's a place where windows legitimately is better than linux.