I would say C3 is closer to Odin than Zig. Given that C3 isn't done yet, I'd personally recommend using Odin over Zig. So there is a clear philosophical difference between the two. Aside of course from Zig departing from C syntax all over.
Zig is in many ways a more ambitious language. Not just in the language itself but in the tooling. Unlike C3 it has the ambition to "do things right" - often by doing things differently. Sometimes that pans out, but sometimes not. For example Zig adds a lot of UB "to be fast", but there's a particularly worrying intersection of (a) UB in overflow, (b) introduction of unsigned overflow and (c) implicit type widening which adds a lot of hidden UB / runtime aborts.
The simple example here is `a : i32 = b + c + d`. Even knowing that b, c and d fits in a short is not sufficient to guarantee this will not have UB. And even if we know that `b + c + d` does not trigger UB, we cannot guarantee that `b + d + c` does not have UB(!). The usual solution it to require explicit widening casts, but that solution seems hard for Zig due to relying on a lot of non-power-of-two types in the core language.
I guess also it's a matter of how much you think C sucks :D
I like C, and C3 is basically just trying to tweak a few things C can't change due to legacy reasons. It doesn't try to be a new "let's write everything from scratch because C is bad" kind of language, if you hate C then C3 isn't for you.
Zig is in many ways a more ambitious language. Not just in the language itself but in the tooling. Unlike C3 it has the ambition to "do things right" - often by doing things differently. Sometimes that pans out, but sometimes not. For example Zig adds a lot of UB "to be fast", but there's a particularly worrying intersection of (a) UB in overflow, (b) introduction of unsigned overflow and (c) implicit type widening which adds a lot of hidden UB / runtime aborts.
The simple example here is `a : i32 = b + c + d`. Even knowing that b, c and d fits in a short is not sufficient to guarantee this will not have UB. And even if we know that `b + c + d` does not trigger UB, we cannot guarantee that `b + d + c` does not have UB(!). The usual solution it to require explicit widening casts, but that solution seems hard for Zig due to relying on a lot of non-power-of-two types in the core language.
I guess also it's a matter of how much you think C sucks :D
I like C, and C3 is basically just trying to tweak a few things C can't change due to legacy reasons. It doesn't try to be a new "let's write everything from scratch because C is bad" kind of language, if you hate C then C3 isn't for you.