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I don't think pcwalton is a stranger to Zig; I'd be surprised if he hasn't played with it yet. Regardless my experience with Zig, is, as far as memory managemen

I don't think pcwalton is a stranger to Zig; I'd be surprised if he hasn't played with it yet. Regardless my experience with Zig, is, as far as memory management was concerned, it was less powerful than C++. A UAF is still trivial in the language (the stdlib makes exploiting one pretty difficult); and the lack of smart pointers still seemed like a strange decision in our multi-threaded, multi-core world. This makes something like the use of sanitizers required for large projects in Zig; It's a race against time until your project gets big enough that someone mistakenly frees something that gets used 200 lines later.

throwaway17_17 4y ago
Slightly off topic, but I would prefer to never see smart pointers in Zig. Smart pointers are an inefficient and semantically-unenforceable ‘solution’ for the wrong problem. Smart pointers are supposed to be a way to handle references to mutable data in concurrent/multi-threaded/distributed computation, however I don’t think they form a satisfactory basis to solve the problem they think they solve. Now, I’m not a fan of Rust’s approach in general or it’s approach to this problem, but at least it is a semantically motivated solution. If a Zig user wants to restrict usage of pointers in certain ways let them make their own data structures, but unless Zig is willing to alter its semantics including a ‘standard’ smart pointer is putting icing on a cardboard box. /edited to fix a typo/