Most of my work is in higher level languages and I never liked C due to its many quirks and footguns which made me think that I just didn't enjoy low level programming.

I learned that I was wrong when I spent some time hacking around lower level programming with Zig and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It just clicks for me in ways that C and C++ never did.

I was fortunate to have learnt low level programming via various BASIC, and Turbo Pascal, alongside Z80 and 8086 Assembly, that C was never special to me, other than being more cross-platform due to the way it came to be.

Luckily around the same time I also got hold of Turbo C++ 1.0, and Borland's Pascal / C++ tag team is what kept me interested.

IMHO the main difference where you need to "think different" compared to lower level languages like C or higher level languages like C++ and Rust is memory management. The entire Zig stdlib expects allocators to be provided by the caller and there's a handful of specialized allocators in the stdlib to pick from. This opens up a lot of flexibility for explicit memory management, but to take real advantage of this new freedom requires some experimentation and unlearning when coming from most other languages.

Zig is strictly better than C. It has a better interop story than Rust. The biggest downside right now is that it isn't stable.

I've been playing around with Zig as a potential C alternative in my stack, and I think that it's pretty good at least for toy/learning projects actually. I especially like the way `comptime` gives me superpowers.

Before Rust and Zig, I thought I disliked systems programming, while as it turned out, I mostly just disliked C.

However, when it comes to actively maintaining a serious project you do need to take extra care, since using a pre-v1 language does require a lot more efforts, since even in a post-v1 language you need to handle lib updates and such...

Also, even though I believe I'm no longer afraid of manual memory management, explicit allocators, etc. for writing regular userland applications, I still think Zig can be too low-level for certain problem domains from time to time (the same thing for C, and I believe Zig is there specifically to target C programmers), so it's really about finding out which tools would be a great fit for you in which scenarios.