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by tw102 1640 days ago
Unfortunately malloc-free is unavoidable if you're writing code that needs to allocate memory rather carefully (e.g. guaranteeing no OOMs—Rust has many situations where it'll silently heap alloc and then panic on OOM). Looks like Zig has accepted that it'll be used for those situations and decided to make that experience really good, instead of deciding to be a rustalike or insist on RAII. I think that's an appropriate choice! It makes me excited to use C less.
2 comments
Arnavion 1640 days ago
RAII and explicit allocators are independent concerns. That Rust chose a bad default in having 1) a static global allocator, and 2) an expectation of infallible allocations from said global allocator that was then made pervasive in its libstd and third-party ecosystem, has nothing to do with the fact that it has lifetime-based destructors. Having explicit allocators does not mean you need to `free` manually instead of via an automatically-called destructor. A type that allocates needs to ensure a corresponding free in its dtor, and then every other code that uses the type gets the lifetime-based cleanup for free.
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jhgb 1640 days ago
I imagine that Zig has a lot more focus on "I can't use X in my environment" types of situation. It seems that for many such situations it might be a better fit than Rust.
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ncmncm 1640 days ago
There is, for practical purposes, noplace where one can't use C++, except where gatekeepers exercise power keep it out. Typically it would be only a day's work to get those building with a C++ compiler, whence they could begin modernizing.

There are plenty of loadable modules in C++ for Linux and BSDs, and plugins for Postgres, in places where there is no expectation of upstreaming them.

Zig is in a similar boat.

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jhgb 1640 days ago
Perhaps you're correct about C++, but I was more referring to the Zig vs. Rust situation.
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ncmncm 1640 days ago
Since the Zig tool chain can also compile C, and Zig can use C headers without translation, the cases are more similar than one might otherwise suspect.

But of course it would be less of an upgrade, and the Zig parts would have to stay clearly segregated.

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