What’s the graceful way of handling out of memory situations in C/C++?

Well, if you are in a case where there is a failure to allocate memory, you’re going to get a std::bad_alloc exception. The exception causes the stack of your program to be unwound. In all likelihood, the inner loops of your application logic are not going to be handling out of memory conditions, only higher levels of your application should be doing that. Because the stack is getting unwound, a significant chunk of memory is going to be free’d — which in fact should be almost all the memory used by your program.

The one exception to this is when you ask for a very large (several hundred MB, for example) chunk of memory which cannot be satisfied. When this happens though, there’s usually enough smaller chunks of memory remaining which will allow you to gracefully handle the failure.

Stack unwinding is your friend 😉

EDIT: Just realized that the question was also tagged with C — if that is the case, then you should be having your functions free their internal structures manually when out of memory conditions are found; not to do so is a memory leak.

EDIT2: Example:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>

void DoStuff()
{
    std::vector<int> data;
    //insert a whole crapload of stuff into data here.
    //Assume std::vector::push_back does the actual throwing
    //i.e. data.resize(SOME_LARGE_VALUE_HERE);
}

int main()
{
    try
    {
        DoStuff();
        return 0;
    }
    catch (const std::bad_alloc& ex)
    {   //Observe that the local variable `data` no longer exists here.
        std::cerr << "Oops. Looks like you need to use a 64 bit system (or "
                     "get a bigger hard disk) for that calculation!";
        return -1;
    }
}

EDIT3: Okay, according to commenters there are systems out there which do not follow the standard in this regard. On the other hand, on such systems, you’re going to be SOL in any case, so I don’t see why they merit discussion. But if you are on such a platform, it is something to keep in mind.