As for me, I’d like to keep contributing to the ecosystem, and I will, whenever I come across a project worth building.”

Idk I don’t write either well enough to have a hand in this but losing out all of this for more Imperative stuff seems like a step back.

“ No functional paradigm

Rust is technically an imperative language, but it draws heavily on functional concepts: zero-cost iterators, lazy evaluation, ADTs, pattern matching, monadic types, traits, closures, and so on. Having also spent time with Haskell and Erlang, I’ve become fairly inclined toward the functional style, and it shows in this library. It leans heavily on FP idioms:

Monadic error control via combinators like Queryable and related types Monadic-style data types like Data<T> with map, flat_map, reduce, and friends Pure, immutable transformations Combinators over iterators instead of loops Closures for local abstraction Declarative macros as a small embedded DSL Sum types and product types”

I would have completely expected that.

All of the Handmade "C successor" languages seem to have this obsession, including not only Zig but Odin, C3 and Jai.

For some toy problems you can do clever allocator tricks and get a huge perf win. For example Jai and Odin both seem to really want you to write code which can throw away a "per-frame" arena periodically so they're not paying to track allocations in the arena because they're all thrown away at the same time.

But a lot of real world software just isn't that simple. This doesn't make such features worthless, it just means they're one of a thousand tools the experienced developer could want in their toolkit, not really deserving headline status.

Now it all feels so pointless though. Like memorizing rules to do mental arithmetic. Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.

fn run_query(alloc) {

   arena = init_arena(alloc);

   defer arena.deinit();

}