I have nothing against Zig, but... am I the only one feeling "new programming language fatigue" lately? Seems like there are several new ones per week these days.
For production code I have learned to choose programming languages that are first class citzen in the platform or libraries that are required for a given project.
While it might seem boring or outdated, it is much more productive and future proof than picking the language and then sort out how to integrate them.
What I do know is that it's one of precious few things in software that I still find interesting enough to bother [0]. I'm guessing part of the answer is that this is where you end up sooner or later.
And then we have the internet, which is a big part of the equation. It's easy to get numb, but I remember a time when information about implementing interpreters/compilers was VERY hard to come by.
It's all good from my perspective, we're barely scratching the surface of what is possible and there are plenty of good ideas left to rediscover in our history.
But I do wish that more designers would dare to step outside of the box more. Creating a language isn't about cherry picking features from existing languages, it's about finding better ways of solving problems.
The barrier to entry is higher, the expectations on the size of the standard library are higher, the expected quality of tools is higher.
Maybe, maybe not, but luckily that question's not very important. Here's what is:
Where is the cleverness and beauty in Yet Another Boring LLVM Frontend(tm)? Zig and Rust are more than that, I'll readily grant - but that description does fall under the umbrella of "implementing a language".
(I say this as just an observer, having written interpreters but no compiled languages.)