Also, lisp has pretty much always been more powerful than C. But what zig brings to the table is an extremely simple language which is also very powerful. Much of the power results from the entire language being available at compile time. You seem so ready to throw that away in favor of could-have-been nostalgia, I wonder if you've taken the time to understand what you're criticizing.

everything else is just bloat and noise that hurts iteration time

and even if one would still value them, you'd need to check only once for whatever memory check you want to run, when you build your allocators for example, and not at every builds, and you could even write the logic yourself and have a debug allocator to ensure memory safeties

you want sub second and not "double digit seconds" build times

it takes one to try to make a game to trully understand why iteration time is far more important that anything else (other than performance of course)

you don't want to wait multiple seconds everytime you change the speed of your character, or tweak the rendering/AI code

that's why then some devs end up using scripting language and they loose all the advantages of their native language, because they want to speed up iteration time

that's why i personally stick to D for my game, my engine + game fully rebuild in under 1 second

you don't get to create memory bugs when you work on your gameplay code ;)