How NOT to write a shared library

[j_g]

I'm interested in audio, so I'm looking over the (frankly horrible) documentation for this new "Pulse Audio" thing, and I see this function in its shared lib:

pa_xmalloc()

Allocates the specified number of bytes, just like malloc() does.

However, in case of OOM, terminate.

First of all, why are so many programmers who write a Linux shared library offering a simple wrapper function around malloc? Is it too hard for an app to just call malloc? Is anyone so completely absent-minded that he can't remember malloc is used to allocate memory, so he needs an equivalent wrapper in every shared lib he uses?

Second of all, in the case of "out of memory", it just terminates your app right then and there??? Oh great, The enduser spends an hour working on something, does some operation, and BANG! -- all his hard work goes down the drain because some shared library decides it wants to terminate the app. Absolutely ridiculous. And I see that other pulse audio functions call this pa_xmalloc too, so good luck getting around it.

I can just see it now. Every programmer who uses pulse audio will need to add a feature to his app called "Auto-save before every Pulse Audio call because this may be your last chance to preserve your work". Yeah, that should really yield "low latency".

Sorry, but anyone who puts a call to exit() in a shared library should simply be shot dead. That's really, really crummy, amateurish programming. In a shared lib, if something fails, the professional thing to do is return some error code/signal to the app, indicating that the function failed. Let the app decide what it wants to do. You don't terminate the app on your own.

And anyone who makes such a shared library a part of his operating system should be shot dead, and then stabbed through the heart with a stake just to make sure he's really dead.

God help us if this pulse audio thing is ever chosen to replace ALSA in the kernel. This will make Linux stability and reliability go to hell if you have operating system calls terminating apps at will.