Comment by ponkpanda
16 hours ago
Not original commenter but the reality with zig is a little in between being simply convention vs. a language requirement. Is it a language requirement? no.
However, there's no global allocator in zig. You simply cannot call the language's equivalent of malloc() because it doesn't exist - at least not as a global symbol. That leaves you with three choices: 1) Define a global allocator; is a valid choice and would make a zig program more like C, C++ or Rust in terms of not having to think about scope-level allocation patterns 2) Pass an allocator into that scope (this is the community convention) 3) Create/instantiate an allocator itself inside that scope
(1) would be valid, though may not be idiomatic; global allocator like malloc becomes an opt-in
(2) Expensive and inefficient for most scopes, though not all.
(3) cheap, idiomatic but potential for noise/boilerplate
> However, there's no global allocator in zig. You simply cannot call the language's equivalent of malloc() because it doesn't exist - at least not as a global symbol.
I mean std.heap.page_allocator is global, and there's only the one, and you can call it from wherever (just as you can malloc). Same with std.heap. c_allocator, which is... malloc! you can also create your own global allocator.
Don't do this in libraries ofc or the ghost of Andrew Kelly will haunt you in hour sleep.
I think you switched 2 and 3.