I have a Lua module I wrote that allow me to do stuff like:

    process.limits.soft.cpu = "4m" -- limit to 4 minutes of CPU time
    process.limits.soft.core = 0 -- and no core file

Yes, ultimately, it ends up in setrlimit(), but the amount of code that goes into backing this up is a bit daunting. But it more than makes up for in showing the intent (and it's not like this is done in the hot path of a program).