Just FYI: things that are actually "saving lives" are probably realtime applications, which need things like deterministic execution time, no allocation from the os, bounded memory usage, which rust generally does not give you without a ton of effort.

This is actually the frame of reference I've taken to giving most folks. Zig is to C what Rust is to C++ in my mind. Is there a lot of overlap between all 4? Absolutely. But devs still choose C over C++ (and Rust) in some cases, and I think it'll be similar for Zig

Thanks for explaining, I really appreciate it.

Yes, but Rust offers something more than just modernizing C++. The borrow checker provides something entirely new that has the potential to make a huge impact.

Just semantics, but I think the borrow checker is part of modernizing C++.

(The way to manage memory in C++ and C is to opt in to a memory management pattern... hopefully you've chosen a good pattern and hopefully you follow it consistently. Patterns are generally backed by utilities and primitives that are hopefully correct, complete, and hopefully make it relatively easy to follow the pattern consistently. Hopefully you can get a linter to help you too. In a sense Rust takes the same approach, but was implemented from the ground up to eliminate all the gaps so you essentially don't have to hope to successfully bridge the gaps yourself.)

Can you elaborate on the savings lives part? I sense a good story, would love to hear.