I have no idea what Zig might turn up to be. I like it a lot aesthetically, but it's far too early to tell what market adoption, if any, it will see. But at least its strategy is clearer: it ignores the (incidental?) "C++ niche" altogether, and says that there are only two categories, low and high, and it's going after low. This covers all of C and the majority (>75%) of the C++ space.