That strategy is more important on systems that don’t do demand paged virtual memory. In Think Class Library on classic Mac OS, it was called the “Rainy day fund”.
One can also do that in stages:
- allocate a large block at startup
- when running out of memory, reallocate it at a smaller size and warn the user
- when running out of memory again, free the block and attempt an orderly shutdown.
One can also do that in stages:
- allocate a large block at startup
- when running out of memory, reallocate it at a smaller size and warn the user
- when running out of memory again, free the block and attempt an orderly shutdown.