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.