I tried Zig in 2017-2018 span (and as part of research I've read quite a bit of Zig over the years). To me the language had some details not previously tried out: special operators for wrapping ops, error value based error returns and pervasive NPOT types. But overall it felt unnecessarily verbose with what I feel were unnecessary changes to established syntax in standard constructs such as "for" and "while". For this reason I started to contribute to C2 instead.

However, my impression was obviously coloured by being around 45 at the time and I was used to program in many different programming languages. Plus I grew up with BASIC, Pascal and C.

There's going to be quite a different experience for someone coming from Go/JS/Java and venturing into low level programming for the first time!

That is not to say that all of the people being enthusiastic about Zig is coming from those particular languages, but I think that C is considered a scary language for many people, so C alternatives tend to attract people from higher level languages to a higher degree than C itself.

When I eventually started on C3, I incorporated some features from Zig. I ended up removing all of them as I found them to be problematic: untyped literals combined with implicit widening, unsigned error on overflow, special arithmetic operators for wrap, saturation.

However, I am very grateful that Zig explored these designs.

From Odin I ended up including its array programming, but for vectors only. I also adopted Odin's use of distinct types.

But most of the C3 features are GCC C extensions plus ASTEC inspired macros.