[mort96]

After reading the description of the problem, I also had the thought, "Maybe FixedBufferAllocator is a bump allocator?". So before reading further, I checked the documentation to see if I was right. Turns out .. there is no documentation for FixedBufferAllocator?

Here's the documentation page: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#A;std:heap.Fix.... It just lists a couple methods, most of which have the description "No documentation provided". From those docs, it doesn't even look like there's a way to allocate memory using the FixedBufferAllocator. You might guess that it implements a bump allocator based on the fact that it only has an 'end_index' and a slice, but wow, I feel like an allocator is the kind of thing you really want to have documented well; especially a bump allocator, and especially especially a bump allocator whose name makes it sound like a general purpose allocator which happens to allocate within a fixed buffer.

I knew it was still early for Zig, but that's a bit disappointing.

[throwawaymaths]

> I knew it was still early for Zig, but that's a bit disappointing.

They're pretty explicit about not taking too much effort to document stuff in the stdlib, because any given thing in there may or may not make the final cut when the stdlib is stabilized (this is deliberate because they don't want to make people pissed or burned out for putting effort into documentation that winds up getting nuked). While FBA (or something like it) will likely make the cut, I'd say, maybe give them a break?

[masklinn]

> From those docs, it doesn't even look like there's a way to allocate memory using the FixedBufferAllocator.

There is but not directly through the FBA, you need to get a concrete Allocator struct out of that by calling the allocator() or threadsafeAllocator() functions.

[mort96]

Yeah, I guessed it was something external. I just said it to illustrate how surprisingly incomplete the docs are, I would expect the docs for an allocator to include enough information to figure out how to allocate something with the allocator.