For me it’s string handling, no private, unused variable is compilation error, and having to implement interfaces myself.
reply> RAII is great; I wish they'd use some light (optional) RAII for strings and containers etc.
replyIs it not possible to build a wrapper that does this? It seems like it should be.
It is. I definitely agree that strings in Zig can be tedious, but the upside is that if you need it, you can build a string library that does everything you want it to do, in the way you want.
replyFor comparison, while Rust offers a very rich string library, it's also very strict about what you can/cannot do with strings, so if your use case falls outside of that you're out of luck. With Zig, you can pretty easily roll your own and make it do what you want. (and when Zig is post 1.0, I imagine there will be some very nice pre-made string libraries by the community etc.)
Why not use an arena allocator?
replyTbh I don't know enough Zig to answer that. Can you give an example? E.g. some non-performance-sensitive function that returns a string? In Rust and C++ you can treat the string exactly the same as you would an integer and it's super easy.
replyIn C you have pain. Does the caller allocate a buffer? How does it know how big to make it? Do you have to have separate calls to calculate the required length? Etc. Can Zig work like Rust/C++ and not like C? My impression is that it can't.
An arena allocator lets you treat a series of allocations as a single block. In cases where you find yourself needing to micromanage a bunch of small memory allocations you can simply ignore freeing them individually and free the whole arena when you are done.
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