Zig Memory Management: The Explicit Allocator Pattern

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:20:00 +0800

This article is based on Zig 0.16.

In the previous articles we covered Zig’s basic syntax and error handling. Now we arrive at the most distinctive part of Zig—memory management.

If you come from Go or Rust, Zig’s memory philosophy will feel unfamiliar: it provides neither garbage collection nor an ownership system. Instead, it chooses a fundamentally different path—the Allocator Pattern. The core convention is remarkably simple, yet far-reaching:

Any function that might allocate memory must accept a std.mem.Allocator parameter.

Allocator on Mi&Bee Blog

Zig Memory Management: The Explicit Allocator Pattern