alt Hacker NewsThe vibe I get from this post is of someone who hasn't routinely used arenas in the past and thinks they're kind of a big deal. But a huge part of the point of an arena is how simple it is. You can just build one. Meanwhile, the idea that arena handles were going to be threaded through every high-allocation path in the standard library is fanciful.
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ndr • yesterday at 6:19 PM
I'm curious, do you have any arena experience out of c/cpp/rust/zig?
It may be that you can "just" build one, but you can't "just" use it and expect any of the available libraries and built ins to work with it.
How many things would you have to "just" rewrite?
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Two big issues in Golang are that you can't actually build an arena allocator that can be used for multiple types in a natural way.
The other is that almost no library is written in such a way that buffer re-use is possible (looking at you, typical kafka clients that throw off a buffer of garbage per message and protobuf). The latter could be fixed if people paid more attention to returning buffers to the caller.