alt Hacker NewsTo be fair, you can enforce this just by filling all the allocated memory with zero, so it's possible to fail at startup.
Or, even simpler, just turn off over-commit.
But if swap comes into the mix, or just if the OS decides it needs the memory later for something critical, you can still get killed.
I would be suprised if some os detects the page of zeros and removes that allocation until you need it. this seems like a common enough case as to make it worth it when memory is low. I'm not aware of any that do, but it wouldn't be that hard and so seems like someone would try it.