how is that different from rust? or is rust a cpp successor?

Rust lives in the smart pointer world. So a good candidate as a c++ succesor. Zig lives in arena alloc and soa world. So it's a better than rust when you need performance beyond the norm.

Just to be clear, you can absolutely do arena allocation and soa in Rust.

In Rust you have convenient escape hatch with a default allocator. It's similar to say "you can do safe applications using C or C++".

Rust is more of a c++ successor, yes.

It’s very much a kitchen sink language.