Question

I port a middle-sized application from C to C++. It doesn’t deal anywhere with exceptions, and that shouldn’t change.

My (wrong!) understanding of C++ was (until I learned it the hard way yesterday) that the (default) new operator returns a NULL pointer in case of an allocation problem. However, that was only true until 1993 (or so). Nowadays, it throws a std::bad_alloc exception.

Is it possible to return to the old behavior without rewriting everything to using std::nothrow on every single call?

Answer 1

You could overload operator new:

#include <vector>

void *operator new(size_t pAmount) // throw (std::bad_alloc)
{
    // just forward to the default no-throwing version.
    return ::operator new(pAmount, std::nothrow);
}

int main(void)
{
    typedef std::vector<int> container;

    container v;
    v.reserve(v.max_size()); // should fail
}