At 18:35 29-08-01, Walter Franzini wrote:
Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> writes:
At 14:57 29-08-01, Walter Franzini wrote:
From the extension (the user of kernel services) pov I must disagree.
But obviusly I'missing something :-)
I don't see why there's a difference.
Maybe the difference is not ZE vs. extension but internal vs. external
data, where external means coming from the outside of PHP/Zend.
If you try to allocate memory for data that come from the outside (the
browser, a db) you should fail gracefully: a malicious user can send
to your app a huge amount of data only to make it crash.
From the user point of view an application that exit without a message
is crashed, no matter how controlled the shutdown is.
Is this a reasonable scenario?
Given the fact that a failed malloc() can often mean that the situation is *really* bad, the best thing to do would be exiting. Doing anything else, such as printing things out, etc., is dangerous, as it may result in a crash. We can argue as to what to do in case we run out of memory - but what you were suggesting is not doing anything, and move the responsibility for the users of the memory manager. No matter how I look at it, that's a bad thing.
But
"Ehi, I can't allocate the memory needed to store a refcount. It's
time to exit!!"
seems reasonable to me.
Due to the reasons I gave in my previous letter, I disagree.
Zeev