Isn't the example difficult to parse only because it's unfamiliar to you? As someone who has never used zig, I feel like 5 minutes of study would make this line easy to read.
You should take a closer look at Nim. I suspect it probably has all that you want, but said features may not be "by default/well advertised" (yet). Alternatively, you should be more specific about what you think it lacks.
That is sadly my gripe with a lot of the newer languages too. I have been looking for something to replace C for a long time, something that makes it easier to not shoot yourself in the foot. I just find most of them significantly less readable than C.
Rust seems to be going down the route of C++, hence I do not deem it a safe language at all, as I have an exceedingly hard time parsing the source and figuring out what is going on.
Zig is WAY better in that regard, but as OP mentions: all the special characters make things more difficult to parse. Calls like these (taken from the introduction page) contain so much visual clutter:
I sadly doubt any of this is possible to change at this stage anymore. Zig definitely seems the most promising C replacement with regards to tooling, especially cross compiling and C interop are a breeze. Truly inspiring work!The only new C-like language that really nailed it for me syntax wise would be Nim. Very clean and easy to reason about, which - from a programmer perspective - makes it exceedingly safe to program in. It just seemingly lacks most of the safety guarantees that the compilers of other, newer languages provide.