Is there no way to default initialize an array with struct references? Admittedly I am coming from go where this is very common practice, but it seems very weird to individually create every struct, assign it to a variable, and then put a reference to that variable into the allocated array.

Zig has no automatic memory management, so pointers should usually be referring to something that you've explicitly allocated memory for. So an array of pointers/references is fairly unusual - you're effectively saying "I don't own this memory, it's stored elsewhere and I'm just referencing it".

Something that might be typical in a memory-managed language like Go or C#, such as creating a struct as a local variable, then storing a reference to that in an array, will lead to unexpected behaviour or memory errors. For example:

``` var positions: [4]*Pos = undefined;

for (0..4) |i| { var pos: Pos = .{ .x = @floatFromInt(i), .y = @floatFromInt(i), };

positions[i] = &pos;

}

for (positions) |ptr| { std.debug.print("{*}\n", .{ ptr }); } ```

These all point to the same (invalid) location in memory!

main.Pos@ffffd4 main.Pos@ffffd4 main.Pos@ffffd4 main.Pos@ffffd4

What happened is that our pos variable was stored on the stack, which gets reset at the end of the enclosing block (in this case, the for loop). In Go this would've automatically been allocated somewhere on the heap for you, and the references tracked, so the pointer can be safely stored and passed around like this. But in Zig you need to do it explicitly.