While address space is huge, RAM isn't infinite. Our embedded Linux runs out of memory quite often. Or if the swap space fills up on a server with a disk. I've

While address space is huge, RAM isn't infinite. Our embedded Linux runs out of memory quite often. Or if the swap space fills up on a server with a disk. I've spent many hours chasing corrupted memory due to someone not checking malloc() fail. I chased code that boiled down to assert( ptr=malloc() ); Guess what happens when NDEBUG is defined?