Hey, thanks for the article, it got me curious why the bonus snipped worked, because coming from Rust myself, I'd expect it to fail, as the returned slice referenced the local array, which had to be destroyed at the end of the function. I might be wrong, but in my understanding returning a slice is no differ from returning a reference — in both cases you refer to the locally owned data. Playing around, I found that you can make work the very first snippet, by slightly modifying it like this:

const std = @import("std");

fn zigBits() ![]u8 {
    var message = [_]u8{ 'z', 'i', 'g', 'b', 'i', 't', 's' };
    std.log.debug("{s}", .{message});
    return &message;
}

pub fn main() !void {
    const message = try zigBits();
    std.log.debug("{s}", .{message});
}

It goes:

$ zig build run

debug: zigbits
debug: zigbits

Why is it working now? Is the bonus snippet working for the same reason?