> Your pledge command imposes some perfectly reasonable resource quotas on programs by default, to prevent that from happening. By default, unless you tune the flags, a program is allowed to use only 4gb of memory and, if you've permitted it to fork off new processes, then it won't be able to spawn more of them at the same time than twice your number of CPUs. That way your sandbox won't compromise the stability of your machine.
4gb and perfectly reasonable are two different things. I'm not sure if there is any sensible default memory limit but if there is one it should probably scale with available memory instead of just hardcoding some magic amount that "ought to be enough for everyone".
I've updated the tool to make the default virtual memory limit equal to the total amount of physical ram. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/commit/7f966de48987f79a... I hope this addresses your concern. No default limit is going to be perfect. Some use cases might want a lot of overcommit for sparse scientific computing. Others might have a ton of RAM, but it's because they want to run thousands of automated programs, rather than one program that dominates the system. I think this is a better limit that's going to help make sure no one runs into any surprises, while still helping to protect the system from an unintentional memory bomb.
4gb and perfectly reasonable are two different things. I'm not sure if there is any sensible default memory limit but if there is one it should probably scale with available memory instead of just hardcoding some magic amount that "ought to be enough for everyone".