I am a low-level zig guy right now too. I have been around for a long time, and it’s funny to see arenas come back into vogue as a solution to nearly everything.

Arenas are great for avoiding allocations per tick/request/frame/layer. No symmetric free() to bracket lifetimes! They have a purpose, and we always knew that.

But by definition, your program is over-allocating as a tradeoff. Makes a ton of sense in certain use cases. However, we didn’t invent garbage collection and borrow-checking and realloc() just to publish papers ;)

Half of my time programming zig is spent considering allocation strategies. That’s a feature. “Where are the bytes?”

Once allocators in general click, memory management in C becomes a total breeze.

Combined with typed fat pointers (slices and strings), typed hashmaps and stack-trace-assertions, C in general becomes quite nice. The rest is compiler flags.

Go solves this by being a better language out of the box, but with the Wirthian aspects removed they feel very similar. Perhaps not so surprising.