Comment by dundarious

Yes, fundamentally my point is that it's pretty much always useful to separate OS allocation from application-level "allocation" (more like consumption of allocated memory than true allocation), and, that application-level "allocation" should always auto-abort() or at least provide a trivially easy way to auto-abort().

So I agree, given malloc and friends are a combination of OS and application-level allocators, they should auto-abort(). I don't focus on malloc and friends though, because I'm not a fan of using the Rube Goldberg machine of "general purpose" allocators in most non-trivial situations. They're complicated hierarchies of size-based pools, and free lists, and locks, and on and on.