But Zig has counterparts to exceptions, templates and anything you may want to do with them; it compares quite nicely with even "rich" C++. The one thing it intentionally doesn't have is operator overloading. In general, I'd say that the difference between Zig and C++ is that when you do some clever stuff in Zig, you need to be explicit about it so that the reader knows this call-site uses dynamic dispatch or that there is a destructor being called or that this operation isn't really the standard +.