When choosing between Zig and Rust for systems programming, I would reach for Rust most of the time. It's just a more expressive language with some seriously awesome compile-time guarantees. There are three things that bother me about Rust: bloated binaries, slow compile times, and dependency bloat (accidentally building 5 versions of the same crate). But seeing as it's being integrated into the Linux Kernel, I think Rust has a long and bright future in that space. Having said that, I think Zig would be a really great language for kernel programming.
