I started messing around with zig in earnest https://github.com/agentultra/zig8 and I have to say that the development experience is great so far. The compile times are fast, the tooling is minimal in the unix sense, and it's been nice to play around with.

Highlights:

- compile-time evaluation

- integrated testing through scoped blocks

- prevents some implicit casts that we take for granted in C

- catches allocation errors

- explicit error return handling

I appreciate it trying to make a better C.