> It would not be a better tool if it were precise at identifying pointers, because of the inevitable false positives that come with trying to scan the whole ob

> It would not be a better tool if it were precise at identifying pointers, because of the inevitable false positives that come with trying to scan the whole object graph for dangling pointers in memory-unsafe languages. I've repeated several times that I was merely demonstrating why Zig and C are fundamentally different when it comes to pointers. You're trying to poke holes at a straw man, and worse, you're doing that while drawing on the very premise which I'm refuting, i.e. that Zig programs and C programs are essentially the same. You could just as likely have assumed that Zig programs behave more like Rust programs (or Go programs), and at the time of deallocation there is just one pointer to the object, and voila, zero false positives. I am not saying that a Zig program should behave like a Rust/Go/Java program, just that your arguments are begging the question. You start with the assumption that Zig and C are essentially the same and then use the resulting conclusions to shore up that very assumption. But Zig programs are about as different from C as they are from Rust. You insist that if you're not Java or Rust then you must be C. Zig is so revolutionary precisely because it works like none of those. Now, I don't know if Zig's revolutionary design is revolutionarily good. It's far too early to tell. But basing your criticism on a false premise completely misses the mark. Of course, it's okay to be skeptical of a new idea, just as I'm skeptical that a type-level shrine for accidental complexity is the way to go. > But the right conclusion to draw from this is that Zig should use a tracing garbage collector. I disagree, but that's a whole other discussion. But since you seem to claim that such a thing could exist and effectively work for Zig and not for C, it seems you accept both of my points: 1. that pointers in both languages are fundamentally different, and 2. that this can be exploited for analyses that are completely different in their effectiveness than those feasible for C or C++.