I'm not the person who you asked, and I'm an absolute rust lover, but--

Rust is for people with C-level problems who don't like C's ergonomics. Zig appears to be for people with C-level problems who do like C's ergonomics.

Some of that is from essential complexity that we've been lying to ourselves about (memory safety, mutability, safe parallelism) and rust makes explicit.

C has a simplicity for it, for better _and_ worse.

In general I prefer languages to be small and simple - like Go and C. This doesn't seem to be a design goal for Rust, which puts me off. Some specifics:

Trying to do anything non-trivial with ownership/lifetimes/borrowing always ends up in a tangle, fighting with the compiler.

Everything in the stdlib seems to have a giant api with pages and pages of functions. Example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html Scrolling down through those methods is overwhelming.

The overhead imposed by the goal of maximising safety is big, and not that important to me (as I'm not writing Very Important Crypto code or whatever, I don't find it hard to write good enough code for my purposes in C).

One place they're thinking of might be integration with C. zig's C integration is crazy good from what I can tell toying around with it. It was as easy as

@cImport({@cInclude("header.h")})

The language is also evolving rapidly, this may have changed, but if it did, it probably changed for the better.