Even Rust has an unsafe subset. There's a meaningful question about how to make such an unsafe language as easy and comfortable to use as possible, and Zig is a decent answer to that particular question. The libraries Zig ships with are especially relevant here, rather than the core language per se: Rust's library facilities are outright terrible to write unsafe code with, because the usual requirements of safe code are assumed throughout and the whole point of unsafe code is to break those. (You can selectively relax those requirements, e.g. take &Cell<T> not &mut T, to allow for benign aliasing - but most stdlib code doesn't bother to!)