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Tbh 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.

In 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.

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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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