I'm wondering if there are common conventions that are worth knowing. e.g., is it common to always pass the allocator as the 1st function arg, etc.
#conventions/best practices for passing allocators to functions?
brittle granite
sonic owl
typically passing the allocator first is a fine bet, although an equally frequent exception to this is when you have something like
fn foo(self: @This(), allocator: Allocator) !void {...}
in this case you pass the allocator second in order to be able to use method syntax
brittle granite
is this example a function declared within a struct? ^
sonic owl
ye
as well, a slightly less frequent but equally valid point of contention is interop with non-zig libraries: e.g., in vulkan, the convention is to pass the allocator last, and so when I was wrapping some vulkan bindings in order to pass zig allocators to vulkan functions, it was easier to also pass it as the last parameter
brittle granite
oh interesting
I would imagine (because I'm still just starting my zig journey) that passing allocators to functions is really contagious, and results in many, many functions taking in allocators
sonic owl
indeed, allocation is contagious
you can think of it like a motivator to at least think in passing "could I do this without allocation?"
brittle granite
is that pretty common across zig codebases, or do people employ tricks to avoid having to pass the allocator arg everywhere?
sonic owl
I mean, "tricks"?
I guess the closest you'd get is that a lot of data structures carry them as fields
brittle granite
well in a way passing an allocator to a struct and then just using it internally is kind of a trick right
sonic owl
but that's not really so much a trick as it's just compacting code
brittle granite
this language seems super cool so far
sonic owl
although this is in reference to naming conventions, I feel this is also pertinent here, from the zig language style guide:
These are general rules of thumb; if it makes sense to do something different, do what makes sense. For example, if there is an established convention such as ENOENT, follow the established convention.
we're not all that dogmatic
brittle granite
that makes sense, I just don't have the background to know established convention in the zig community yet. kind of at the heart of my question