Provide a mechanism to allow attempting a segment of code that could OOM, with the ability to fall back in case it does.

[dead-claudia]

This would be valuable for very large allocations where you don't want to crash the application or page, but instead display an error or otherwise tolerate such failure.

[erights]

I don't understand the title of this issue. Could you clarify? Thanks.

[dead-claudia]

Something like this:

try {
    const foo = new Uint8Array(1*1024*1024*1024)
} catch out of memory somehow {
    // display an error or maybe try with a smaller chunk size
}

Stuff like downloading files to decrypt using Web Crypto (which lacks a streaming API and has been dragging their feet for well over a year despite the demand and precedent) and large image/video processing come to mind.

Regarding language precedent, here's a few I found in a few minutes of searching:

• C's obvious - malloc can return a null pointer and you can branch off that
• C++ has the exception std::bad_alloc for general allocations and std::bad_array_new_length for array allocations
• Rust is currently in the process of adding Box::try_new and friends
• Python has MemoryError
• Ruby has NoMemoryError
• Java has OutOfMemoryError