This does make me appreciate some of the decisions that Zig has made, about passing allocators explicitly and also encouraging the use of the ArenaAllocator for most programs.

Since Zig built up the standard library where you always pass an allocator, they avoided the problem that the article mentions, about trying to retrofit Go's standard library to work with an arena allocator.

Although, that's not the case for IO in Zig. The most recent work has actually been reworking the standard library to be where you explicitly pass IO like you pass an allocator.

But it's still a young language so it's still possible to rework it.

I really do enjoy using the arena allocator. It makes things really easy, if your program follows a cyclical pattern where you allocate a bunch of memory and then when you're done just free the entire arena