Since when do heap allocation failures on Linux result in an abort? In C, malloc(3) will return NULL on failure and set errno accordingly. Sure, if overcommit is enabled, you might get a fault if you try to access memory that was allegedly allocated, but there is no strict "malloc failure === fatal error" relationship.
malloc never fails on normal Linux configurations except in very rare instances not applicable to this discussion (e.g. allocating a single structure larger than your virtual memory space).
