What is the best way to handle unrecoverable errors like OutOfMemory in an application?

[AndrewCodeDev]

@Sze

pub fn schedule(allocator: std.mem.Allocator, mesh: *ChunkMesh) !void {
    const task = try allocator.create(@This());
    errdefer allocator.destroy(task);
    task.* = .{
        .mesh = mesh,
    };
    try main.threadPool.addTask(task, &vtable); // Uses another allocator internally
}

I’m going to go one step further and suggest something different here because while I get what you’re saying, this still has the problem from before:

Imagine we have an error like so…

           alloc1
              |
         {   OOM, X, Y Z  }
              |
           alloc2

You now have two allocators using the same error. So which one failed? If you have a long enough call stack, this can become impractical to solve.

So I’m going to make a suggestion here…

// somewhere up above...

const task = try allocator.create(T);
errdefer allocator.destroy(task);
task.* = .{
    .mesh = mesh,
};

// then later...
pub fn schedule(task: *Task) !void {
    try main.threadPool.addTask(task, &vtable); // Uses another allocator internally
}

I’ll meet you halfway - I think mixing allocators for the same function (if they both can fail) is not optimal, but I get your point about not using a global allocator for the current use case.