Recently I had a similar problem with perl5.8.8 on Cygwin. I think I was running out of memory in a print statement.

It took me about three hours to figure out what the problem was. An error or warning would have helped. I am used to silly warnings about deep recursion. Running out of memory should rate at least a warning.

I expect this problem to get worse as the limitations of 32 bit systems become increasingly confining.

When I made a test program for exhausting memory, I got a helpful error message, "Out of Memory!" I have gotten the same helpful message when I ran out of memory due to a program bug. I think the problem of silent memory-induced process death is a problem only in certain scenarios.