Hundreds of millions of people use non-overcommit systems. That's a good thing, because overcommit is a mistake that encourages profligate use of system resources. I fear that abort-on-OOM will only reinforce the presumption of overcommit in the minds of developers. Even on overcommit systems, you can run out of address space or vsize.
I believe in treating memory like any other resource. You wouldn't abort by default when you run out of disk space, would you?
> You wouldn't abort by default when you run out of disk space, would you?
If most of the language and standard library required allocating disk space to function then I would indeed abort by default, because very few programs would be able to do anything useful in those conditions, so the most useful thing is to fail fast.
It's possible to design a language and standard library that can remain usable in out-of-memory conditions, but the costs would be severe, and not justified for the overwhelming majority of rust use cases, I think.
I believe in treating memory like any other resource. You wouldn't abort by default when you run out of disk space, would you?