Not really, the sentinel is part of the type and the allocator interface in Zig is type-aware, meaning that you can't simply "forget" about sentinels. The type system will fight you.
So creating a pointer to a type with a fixed length and a sentinel and creating a new one will automatically allocate enough for the length + the sentinel? That's nice.
I'm still not sure I like the .len 'misreporting' since it would be harder to
manually optimize around, e.g. packing a struct with a 8 byte + sentinel array would take 16 bytes that I might not notice if I am going by `.len`. This is all speculation, though. I need to actually play around with Zig.
I'm still not sure I like the .len 'misreporting' since it would be harder to manually optimize around, e.g. packing a struct with a 8 byte + sentinel array would take 16 bytes that I might not notice if I am going by `.len`. This is all speculation, though. I need to actually play around with Zig.