This assumption lead to Rust's standard library not having a way to catch allocation failures (which is only now being rectified, and only partially).

It's very Linux-centric and presumes a certain config+usage pattern. Not true on Windows. Not quite true on macOS. Not true in WASM. Definitely not true on embedded platforms.

Is there somewhere to read about how rust is tackling this problem?

1. Rust the language knows nothing about allocation. If you care about this behavior, it mostly limits the code of others' that you can use, but you can always write your own versions of things that respect fallible allocations.

2. Rust's standard library assumes memory is infallible. This is partially because it's a good default, and partially because our allocator API was not ready yet.

3. We've been working on the allocator API.

4. We have a rough plan for parameterizing data structures over allocators.

5. If this topic is of interest to you, https://github.com/rust-lang/wg-allocators is where to get involved.