I agree, and much easier than Rust to get going and then some. Other than playing with Nannou in Rust to 'get' the language, and the Rust book, I started a toy game in Zig without more than the skeleton put together here:

https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

I like Raylib, and there are bindings for most popular languages, but I like the minimalism I can start with fairly quickly in Zig. I tried Bevy for Rust, but it is a lot more involved, and Rust, so Zig it is for now.

For safety, and high-integrity software, I am sticking with SPARK2014. Rust will get there soon, but Ada/SPARK2014 have such a lead, maturity, and industry take up that I am putting Rust down for another year or more.

I kinda wish SPARK were mainstream. Ada kind of aims for the same things as Rust, but it's been around such a long time. It's amazing how long C has stayed around.

That's a bit debatable. Vlang is right there too. This would all be relative to what people are trying to do. Many people might really be looking for a C and C++ replacement, of which there are a number of viable alternatives (including good old Object Pascal), but then preferences and other factors makes things cloudy.

Rust is the one Torvalds seems most interested in, and I suspect that's a deciding factor.

Zig might be the most direct upgrade from C, but it seems like rust can mostly replace the entire concept of portable assembly, since it has zero cost abstractions.