Question

I’m trying to figure out if the boost::multi_array constructor or resize method can throw a bad_alloc exception (or some other exception indicating the allocation or resize failed). I can’t find this information in the documentation anywhere.

Clarification (added from comment):

This is a scientific algorithm that can fall back to a less memory intensive (slower) method if the allocation fails. Basically there are two dynamically allocated 3-dimensional arrays to hold “distances” (correlation) between all pairs of genes in a query and all genes in a cross-validation set for each of a large number of datasets. The slower method recalculates each distance on the fly as it is needed. This is for a C++ version of an existing Java implementation, which implemented both methods and would fall back on an out of memory exception. I don’t really expect to run out of memory.

Answer 1

1st: (answering the real question): As it uses dynamically allocated memory, yes, it can throw std::bad_alloc (I have never seen boost translation std::bad_alloc exceptions; it would be crazy to do so).

2nd: (comment on your clarification): You do need the information of available physical memory to optimize the performance of your algorithm at run-time. However, you cannot rely on std::bad_alloc to determine how much memory you have available, as modern operating systems use such a thing as overcommit, meaning: they (almost) never return a failed allocation attempt, but instead just give you some “memory”, which will only fail to jump into existence when you actually try to access it.

In Java this may work as the VM is doing many things for you: it tries to allocate some continuous memory chunks, and does so with respect to the available physical memory, and the available unused physical memory to decide whether it should stress the GC more or just allocate a larger junk. Also, for performance reason you need to take into account that virtual memory and physical memory are quite different concepts.

If you need to performance-optimize you algorithms for such cases (which may well be necessary, depending on your area of work), you need to inspect your platform-specific functions which can tell you how “the real world” looks like.