Possibly memory safe (possibly. Helix, for example, recently had a build that was crashing due to memory safety problems) doesn’t explicitly mean “great security”.
Sorry I can’t be any more help on specifics than that. I am WAY beyond fiddling with my tools when they give me trouble. I just moved back to neovim.
It has many "unsafe" and "transmut", and this is without the bazillion external dependencies it also depends on.
I’ve been writing zig for a couple months now and have only once accidentally leaked in a test, and haven’t once accidentally messed up a buffer.
Not saying you can’t, because zig definitely has escape hatches, but idiomatic zig has proven quite easy to stay safe without even thinking about it.
No. Neither is as pedantic as rust, but zig has been a joy to work in compared to either C++ or Rust in my opinion.
Rust sometimes forces you to add annotations which certainly can get unwieldy at times (I think this in particular trips a lot people because sometimes they know what they want to tell the compiler but don't know how to express it in Rust speak and thus anger ensues). Zig, on the other hand, doesn't require any of that and makes code look simple and arguably more pleasant in comparison, but it doesn't mean the "contract" between objects goes away. It's just not expressed in code and checked by the compiler but rather by the person writing the code.
Take [0] for example. The compiler (at least in the current stage, it's at 0.11 after all) is perfectly happy with code which returns a pointer to a stack allocated memory from a function. The fix is to remember that you need to pass the argument via pointer and not let the compiler decide for you. But what if the programmer forgets or somebody else is working on the code?