I'm not sure about Zig, but what strikes me about the others are that they change the type of the object. T vs T*. It would be kind of neat if you could have

I'm not sure about Zig, but what strikes me about the others are that they change the type of the object. T vs T*. It would be kind of neat if you could have an annotation on the variable instead that didn't change the type. You could in C++ make a reference T& which is almost that - references behave identically to the real thing. But I think freeing the memory backing a reference is probably quite questionable?