I think when we're looking back on the 2020s we'll be struck by the Allocator obsession
All of the Handmade "C successor" languages seem to have this obsession, including not only Zig but Odin, C3 and Jai.
For some toy problems you can do clever allocator tricks and get a huge perf win. For example Jai and Odin both seem to really want you to write code which can throw away a "per-frame" arena periodically so they're not paying to track allocations in the arena because they're all thrown away at the same time.
But a lot of real world software just isn't that simple. This doesn't make such features worthless, it just means they're one of a thousand tools the experienced developer could want in their toolkit, not really deserving headline status.
Some of this surely stems from Rust not originally supporting allocators at the standard API level until later. You can manually create your own, and create/modify your own containers, but until GlobalAlloc came around it sometimes involved doing things like passing through Arc<Allocator> through to things if you wanted multiple things to use a single one.
Sometimes using a global one isn't the best thing (it's often a good idea to specialise base on allocation size, reuse and lifetimes), but I've used them quite a bit in C++ over the past 16 years doing HPC for graphics, rendering and simulation, so calling them only useful for "toy problems" likely shows you just haven't found a need for them in what you've been doing.
tialaramex · · focus · HN ↗
All of the Handmade "C successor" languages seem to have this obsession, including not only Zig but Odin, C3 and Jai.
For some toy problems you can do clever allocator tricks and get a huge perf win. For example Jai and Odin both seem to really want you to write code which can throw away a "per-frame" arena periodically so they're not paying to track allocations in the arena because they're all thrown away at the same time.
But a lot of real world software just isn't that simple. This doesn't make such features worthless, it just means they're one of a thousand tools the experienced developer could want in their toolkit, not really deserving headline status.
pixelesque · · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes using a global one isn't the best thing (it's often a good idea to specialise base on allocation size, reuse and lifetimes), but I've used them quite a bit in C++ over the past 16 years doing HPC for graphics, rendering and simulation, so calling them only useful for "toy problems" likely shows you just haven't found a need for them in what you've been doing.