Memory Layout in Zig with Formulas

I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which offers a safer, more memory-explicit experience for systems programming, without sacrificing low-level control or C interoperability. Notably, Zig makes it straightforward to manage memory allocation by treating allocators as first-class values rather than hidden globals. Instead of relying on an implicit runtime or a process-wide allocator, you pass explicit allocator objects into the code that needs them. This makes ownership and lifetimes much clearer, encourages you to design APIs around who is responsible for allocating and freeing memory, and makes it easy to swap in custom allocation strategies (e.g., arenas, scratch, tracking, etc.). ↩

raymondtana.github.io · Raymond Tana