Why Zig's explicit allocators make it a great fit for building databases
arpit_bhayani · x · 2026-10-23
arpitbhayani breaks down Zig's memory allocation design and why it suits database development:
- Zig has no default allocator; any function needing heap memory takes an Allocator parameter, so allocation is visible in the signature, and every allocation can fail with error.OutOfMemory.
- Allocator is just an interface: ArenaAllocator frees everything at once, FixedBufferAllocator works from a provided buffer (often on-stack), and std.testing.allocator fails tests on leaks.
Why this fits databases: no GC, explicit allocation lets a DB allocate everything at startup, struct layout control matters for fixed-size records and pages on disk, and failures are explicit — essential when a crash can corrupt data.
Good fits: key-value and embedded stores, LSM/B-tree engines, in-memory caches, and transactional/ledger databases like TigerBeetle. The trade-off is passing allocators and reasoning about ownership, in exchange for predictable memory behavior.
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