Comment by fwlr
10 hours ago
Someone asked me why Zig programmers seem to genuinely enjoy passing the allocator around as an argument. I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but I think I do now, thanks to your comment - feeling the “weight” of allocations is an example of mechanical sympathy, and having to pass around and use an allocator explicitly makes your code-effort more closely resemble the chip-effort it is asking for.
Heap allocations aren't really the culprit of the waste that the root comment is talking about. Indirection in general is, and passing around an allocator doesn't guard you against that. Virtual dispatch occurs even for objects on the stack.
Yes, I was suggesting allocation as another example of the same principle.