Comment by Zambyte
1 day ago
I'm doing pretty much this exact pattern with NATS right now instead of Redis. Cool to see other people following similar strategies.
The fact that the Zig ecosystem follows the pattern set by the standard library to pass the Allocator interface around makes it super easy to write idiomatic code, and then decide on your allocation strategies at your call site. People have of course been doing this for decades in other languages, but it's not trivial to leverage existing ecosystems like libc while following this pattern, and your callees usually need to know something about the allocation strategy being used (even if only to avoid standard functions that do not follow that allocation strategy).
I have a few cases in this (proof of concept) codebase that require knowledge about allocation strategy, even in Zig, but that's on me and the design at this point. Something I wanted to touch on more in the post was the attempt to make the components of the system work with any kind of allocation strategy. I see a common thing in Zig projects today where something like `gpa: std.mem.Allocator` or even `arena: std.mem.Allocator` is used to signal intent, even though the allocator interface is generic.