Not original commenter but the reality with zig is a little in between being simply convention vs. a language requirement. Is it a language requirement? no.

However, there's no global allocator in zig. You simply cannot call the language's equivalent of malloc() because it doesn't exist - at least not as a global symbol. That leaves you with three choices: 1) Define a global allocator; is a valid choice and would make a zig program more like C, C++ or Rust in terms of not having to think about scope-level allocation patterns 2) Pass an allocator into that scope (this is the community convention) 3) Create/instantiate an allocator itself inside that scope

(1) would be valid, though may not be idiomatic; global allocator like malloc becomes an opt-in

(2) Expensive and inefficient for most scopes, though not all.

(3) cheap, idiomatic but potential for noise/boilerplate