Zig doesn't have mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety. It's not spacially memory safe: extern unions, sentinel-terminated pointers, and multi-element pointers break it. At best, we think there's probably some subset of Zig that you could define that is spacially memory safe. (This isn't a particularly interesting property because it's trivially true for any language, by the way: C without pointers and without arrays is a subset of C that's memory safe, for instance, and also uninteresting.)
> No, Zig is a low-level language, and the vast majority of low-level programs in 2022 are written in languages whose memory-safety story is worse than Zig's.
Zig claims to be a general-purpose language, not just a low-level one. From [1]: "Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software."
> I mean, it sure is better to have more guarantees if they come for free, but there's no such option in front of us just yet.
It's better to have more guarantees if the benefit of the guarantees outweighs the cost, not if there is no cost. For example, for many apps, the benefit of memory safety outweighs the cost of a garbage collector.
> You can't insist there's consensus when clearly there are people who disagree with you. That's the definition of a lack of consensus.
Consensus doesn't mean that nobody disagrees. It means that the opposite position is a fringe view.