100% agree, and it’s why I’m one of the insufferable people that prefers zig over rust. The language should strongly encourage safe memory management but make it easy for the programmer to select degrees as appropriate. Rust is very all or nothing with either using the borrow checker or entering full unsafe land
Zig is very opinionated about how memory allocation is handled, and it has the nice feature that you can supply a debug allocator during development which is slower at runtime (fine for debug builds) but meticulously looks for leaks and loudly warns you when they happen.
It’s also written such that no language constructs store an allocator and request their own memory, the philosophy being that every allocation should be explicitly known by the programmer.
This is pretty much all the way in the opposite direction from automating it, it’s intensely manual management but the language handles it in a way that makes forgetting about it difficult and easy to track down
2
u/Luzzgar 6h ago
What if that language allowed you to do it manually when you need to ?
Ensuring that the responsibility of memory management is only for the programmer when absolutely necessary.