[jkrejcha]

To be 100% fair, it's rare that processes are cloned on Windows, if only because it's part of the Native API that applications generally don't use directly, and CreateProcess is easier and does all the housekeeping stuff, etc, that people writing Windows applications generally come to expect (or don't even know happens)

I do think overcommit was a poor design choice, but I think it probably mostly does logically follow from the fact that fork and friends are the only ways available to create a process that's available to userspace. It's quite unfortunate though.

Part of the problem is that some applications wanted to reserve lots of address space but didn't necessarily want to touch it right away (such as when they were using it sparsely). Something that VirtualAlloc(x, MEM_RESERVE) (or mmap(..., MAP_NORESERVE)) would be suited for. But while malloc exists, mreserve doesn't in libc, and I think it was pretty uncommon to use it.