Zig seems to have captured a lot of attention in the new language design space, and I personally find this unfortunate. Frankly, I find it irresponsible that the team has marketed a pre 1.0 language so heavily. By constantly evolving the language and making frequent breaking changes, they are quite literally wasting people's time. They also have been very hostile to people who have raised fair points about the misleading claims that they have made.
From my perspective, the entire premise of the language is flawed. The main project goal seems to be to become a replacement for c. This means that in some sense the project is implicitly defined by c and doesn't really stand on its own conceptually. This could be ok if it actually fixed some of the worst problems with c, but most of what it offers appears to be relatively superficial syntactic improvements (which could easily be implemented by a simple transpiler to c). While I am sure that the language designers see things differently, it appears that Zig just lets c programmers keep writing c with some additional compiler checks. This is probably an improvement on c (at least in some respects), but it seems largely incremental. Also because they prematurely evangelized the language, they are likely to be weighed down by the additional complexity that seeped in from trying to support so many different use cases before they had really figured out what the language is.
That it took two years to write the self hosting compiler speaks to the fact that this language is already quite complex. My guess is that this complexity is always going to pose problems. Downstream users are always going to be finding obscure edge cases that don't work because the language supports so many different things that actually testing everything is going to be extremely difficult.
Having said all that, if you love Zig, that's great. I don't doubt that it offers some real quality of life improvements for you. I just personally believe that this project is an evolutionary dead end and that it is very unlikely to have significant mindshare/deployment in say, 10-20 years.
Why do you care so much about a language you have no interest in? Just ignore it and move on, there's plenty of programming languages under the sky to have fun with and which probably fit your idea of a good programming language much better than Zig.
From my perspective, the entire premise of the language is flawed. The main project goal seems to be to become a replacement for c. This means that in some sense the project is implicitly defined by c and doesn't really stand on its own conceptually. This could be ok if it actually fixed some of the worst problems with c, but most of what it offers appears to be relatively superficial syntactic improvements (which could easily be implemented by a simple transpiler to c). While I am sure that the language designers see things differently, it appears that Zig just lets c programmers keep writing c with some additional compiler checks. This is probably an improvement on c (at least in some respects), but it seems largely incremental. Also because they prematurely evangelized the language, they are likely to be weighed down by the additional complexity that seeped in from trying to support so many different use cases before they had really figured out what the language is.
That it took two years to write the self hosting compiler speaks to the fact that this language is already quite complex. My guess is that this complexity is always going to pose problems. Downstream users are always going to be finding obscure edge cases that don't work because the language supports so many different things that actually testing everything is going to be extremely difficult.
Having said all that, if you love Zig, that's great. I don't doubt that it offers some real quality of life improvements for you. I just personally believe that this project is an evolutionary dead end and that it is very unlikely to have significant mindshare/deployment in say, 10-20 years.