So basically, Zig doesn't have lambdas, but because you still need lambdas, you need to reinvent the wheel each time you need it?
Why don't they just add lambdas?
Why don't they just add lambdas?
Well, not really.
Consider lambdas in C++ (that was the perspective of the post I replied to). Before lambdas, you used functors to do the same thing. However, the syntax was slightly cumbersome and C++ has the design philosophy to add specialized features to optimize specialized cases, so they added lambdas, essentially as syntactic sugar over functors.
In zig the syntax to use an anonymous struct like a functor and/or lambda is pretty simple and the language has the philosophy to keep the language small.
Thus, no need for lambdas. There's no re-inventing anything, just using the language as it designed to be used.
Lambdas are great for convenience and productivity. Eventually they can lead to memory cycles and leaks. The side-effect is that software starts to consume gigabytes of memory and many seconds for a task that should take a tiny fraction of that. Then developers either call someone who understands memory management and profiling, or their competition writes a better version of that software that is unimaginably faster. ex. https://filepilot.tech/
If you return a pointer to a local variable that outlives the scope, the pointer would be dangling. Does that mean we should ban pointers?
If you close over a pointer to a local variable that outlives the scope, the closure would be dangling. Does that mean we should ban closures?
If you do want it, you have the option to, say, heap allocate.