Zig is a middle ground. It solves some of the common foot-guns in C, Without the costs of affine substructural typing that offers Rust its super powers.

I am of the opinion that it is horses for courses and not a universal better proposition.

Because my needs don’t fit in with Rust’s decisions very well I will use zig for personal projects when needed. I just need linked lists, graphs etc…

While hopefully someone can provide a more comprehensive explanation here are the two huge wins for my use case.

1) In Zig, accessing an array or slice out of bounds is considered detectable illegal behavior.

2) defer[0] allows you to collocate the the freeing of resources with code.

That at least ‘feels’ safer to me than a bunch of ‘unsafe’ rust that is required for my very specific use case.

I was working on some eBPF code in C and did really miss zig.

For me it fits the Pareto principle but zig is also just a sometimes food for me, so take that for what it is worth.

[0] https://zig.guide/language-basics/defer/