Re: Failure to allocate gtk object

[John Cupitt <jcupitt gmail com>]

On 10/5/05, Nikolaj Kiær Thygesen <Nikolaj Thygesen ciber dk> wrote:
>     Just a quickie... What happens if the gtk_*_new() function fails to allocate memory for a widget??? 
> From looking at sources I'm under the impression that the program will simply exit, but, if so, is there 
> any way of keeping it afloat and reveive a NULL-pointer-return instead???

Nope, the _new() funcs are not allowed to return NULL. You can do two things:

1) provide your own memory alloc, catch out-of-mem, free some stuff
(perhaps flush a cache?) and retry
2) if you allocate memory yourself (perhaps for a large cache?), you
can use g_try_malloc() instead, which can return NULL

I think the argument is that it is very difficult to recover
gracefully from out-of-mem in a GUI, since almost any action you might
take to recover will itself require some memory to be allocated.

In any case, out-of-mem is very rare for most programs, thanks to
virtual memory and friends. Programs which are allocating enough stuff
to possibly fill memory are probably so 'heavy' that the resource
intensive work could be split off to another process to avoid crashing
into the GUI code. I guess things are different for people working
with embedded systems.

John