Sometimes my laptop crashes when I open up facebook. Never had any issue with programs though. I'm pretty sure the program's resources are limited by the system to prevent things like this from happening.

Are you using linux by any chance?

Something similar happened to me once. One way to get around it is to limit memory per process and set timeout

ulimit -a will show you various limits. If you have unlimited stack size limit, I recommend changing it to e.g. 256MB (ulimit -s 256000). There are also some other limits for memory, but I never used/changed them.

Many times due to infinite loop entire ubuntu stops responding. Then force shutdown, using power button is the only option.

As I said much much earlier, advanced technology so often go wrong. You can never go wrong with notepad. Replace .txt with .cpp and submit. Now you might wonder: "what if i make bug?" Well tourist once said, best way to debug is to not make bug in first place. Notepad train your mind, and your coding skill, no downsides.

But have you ever made a bug that crashed your OS? The one you described just caused slow or exhausted swap (maybe it was zero-size?). The OS didn’t crash until you hard reset it.

I didn't have a bug, but I was testing a function for a linked list for 2 billion nodes. Apparently, 2 billion nodes was too much (but I didn't know that!), and I had the same thing happen to me. It froze after about 10 million, and bad things happened. I'd be curious to see if there's a way to prevent these scenarios.

you can use setrlimit syscall on linux.

#include <vector>                                                                                     
#include <sys/resource.h>                                                                             

int main() {                                                                                          
  rlimit cpu_time{.rlim_cur = 1, .rlim_max = 2};                                                      
  setrlimit(RLIMIT_CPU, &cpu_time);                                                                   

  std::vector<int> v;                                                                                      
  while (true) v.push_back(1);                                                                        
}

this program would not be allowed to consume more than 2 seconds (rlim_max) of CPU time. You can set other limits too. Reference: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/setrlimit.2.html

This happened, because of the way C++ std::vector works internally. It allocates an array of objects of required size dynamically (on heap). When the array becomes full (using push_back ), it allocates one with double the original size, and copies all the elements. Since heap size is bounded only by the size of RAM (or virtual memory) on your PC, it kept allocating infinite memory leading to lack of space of all other processes, and crash. So, a solution to this would be 1. Not having a vector (or any container) of objects of size more than 10^7. 2. Keeping time and memory limits on your code like others have suggested. 3. Keeping your memory usage in check.

I have a problem during the last subregional of ICPC South America. 15 minutes left to finish the contest a bug caused the computer to got frozen. It took a good time to reset the computer.

It happened to me 2 years ago in an offline contest.

I wrote a code that generate Fibonacci strings (i.e. s₁ = "a", s₂ = "b", s_n = s_n - 2 + s_n - 1, the limit of n was such high that the string might have about 10¹⁸ characters, if enough memories could be provided).

And when I ran it, the computer I used froze immediately, forcing me to force-restart it :D