It does.
> It's not spacially memory safe: extern unions, sentinel-terminated pointers, and multi-element pointers break it.
We've been through that. Those are syntactically delineated unsafe features for C/hardware interop. Rust has them, too.
> This isn't a particularly interesting property because it's trivially true for any language
That's right, but Zig is much closer to Rust than to C in that regard. It has clearly marked unsafe features for C or hardware interop, which aren't used in other situations and could be mechanically excluded -- just as in Rust.
> Zig claims to be a general-purpose language, not just a low-level one.
Surely you agree it's also a low-level language?
> It's better to have more guarantees if the benefit of the guarantees outweighs the cost, not if there is no cost.
Yep, and we don't know if we're there in low level languages. So far it seems that some people find the cost of Rust acceptable and others do not. In other words, there's no consensus on what the acceptable cost is.
> It means that the opposite position is a fringe view.
So disagreeing that the only right design is that of a language that's struggling to get 1% of the market is a fringe view? That's like a Haskeller declaring that it is a fringe view to disagree that non-strict pure functional programming is the only right way to write programs. I think that Odin and JAI, two other low level languages in development, also don't go down the full memory-safety soundness path. Seems to me to be quite far from a fringe view.
If people aren't buying what Rust is selling -- regardless of how strongly some feel about the justice of its approach -- I think that those of us who care about correctness must explore alternatives, and Zig is certainly a fascinating alternative. It might well be the case that neither Rust nor Zig succeed in the market, but even in that case, both can certainly serve as inspiration for the languages that follow.