[sobeston]

This is silly.

If you make code that requires allocation and does not have an allocator passed into it, there is literally nothing stopping you from allocating anyway. Zig does not stop you from, for example, heap allocating without the usage of an allocator (Zig does not know what heap allocation even is). You can directly use the std page_allocator (and others) wherever you want, too.

There are very few good reasons to do this (e.g. spawning a thread requires particular allocation; using an allocator might not be sound depending on the OS).

All you have to do is document that it allocates memory and that's fine; there is no split.

[lhorie]

I tend to agree that allocator param isn't that strong of an argument (e.g. one can easily just store a pointer to the allocator in a struct to hide it from method signatures). And it is quite valid to just create a local allocator and `defer a.free(thing)` to clean up at the end of a function (for example, if you just need a trivial std.mem.join and you know that you can fit the result in stack). One does not need to use the top-level GPA/arena for everything.

But nonetheless I think there is a split (at least for now). Zig async function frames are different than regular functions, so even if syntactically, `foo()` could magically be switched between sync or async based on io_mode, in practice if you have a recursive call tree doing fs operations, it'll work in one mode (up until a stack overflow, that is) and throw a compile error upfront in the other. Presumably this would not be an issue anymore once [0] is implemented.

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1006