What are sentinals?

[squeek502]

Some links to other threads that might be helpful:

Are sentinels only intended for null terminators?

Sentinel-terminated anything is mostly useful for interoperating with C APIs, since if you’re dealing with Zig APIs, then regular ol’ slices are better in most situations. So the usefulness of non-0 sentinels would be dependent on the C APIs you are interacting with. For example, the Lua C API has some functions that take an array of luaL_Reg structs where: Any array of luaL_Reg must end with a sentinel entry in which both name and func are NULL. In C, that looks like: static const luaL_Re…

How to correctly resize a sentinel-terminated array?

Welcome to the forum! I agree that it’s weird that there is no realloc for sentinel-terminated slices. Am I correct to assume that stringProvider is the C API function and you have no control over that? (if you have control over it I would just use an ArrayList instead, which has more safety) For now I can only suggest you some less gross versions: test "method 2 advanced: sentinel slicing" { const buffer = try alloc.alloc(u8, 9000); errdefer alloc.free(buffer); const length = …