I always liked C. I enjoyed how brutal it is, except the preprocessor.
This is why zig is a godsend. It is actually simpler than C while being more precise than C!
For example zig can distinguish between a pointer to a single element vs a pointer to an array of unknown length. Where as in c abi, it is all T*
When importing a c lib, you can make it more ergonomic to use than c itself.
Being able to easily import c lib is especially important to game dev, as practically all so called c++ libs also export a c header as they know how important it is.
https://github.com/zig-gamedev has a lot of repos of ziggified c libs used in games.
As for the preprocessor, zig comptime is so much better. It’s just more zig that runs at compile time.