I understand the place for rapid prototyping etc., and that not every software application deals with life-and-death situations — but even those that aren’t, I think our industry suffers a bit here. For example, to this day the Windows 10 start menu refuses to open sometimes (randomly) when I click on it, even multiple times. You could argue that this isn’t a huge deal, because within 30 seconds it usually “fixes itself” (or something like that), but it still doesn’t shake the overall feeling that we’re tolerating way too much shoddy software in 2018 than we should.
Or in terms of performance: I know not every application needs bare-to-the-metal speed, but something feels wrong with the world when my “supercomputer” (compared to a 1990s PC, for example) literally lags when I’m typing or scrolling in some apps, when a 1990s era PC could respond to essentially the same content interaction with almost zero latency.
Some few decades ago, we had far more klunkier programming languages, far slower hardware, and yet somehow yielded better tangible/functional results in some cases. Therefore, I’m very much in favor of anything that moves us towards higher quality software, and Zig (and Rust, and others) are all exciting examples of that.
It's clear what his point is.
One of the two examples he cited in his introduction, the Android one, wasn't even caused by an unhandled OOM error. Android by design will kill unused processes if they're occupying memory that the foreground process needs.
If we want software without bugs, removing hidden allocations in languages is far down in the priority list.
Most languages make allocations behind your back so that your code can focus on the logic you actually care about since you could not do anything about running ot of memory anyways.
However there are projects where that level of control matters. For those projects C is currently still the default choice, even though it was designed more than 40 years ago. Some choices made back then might be huge liabilities for code we are writing now, because we still need that kind of language. A modern alternative to C could provide a huge value to all of us, mostly through more correct, secure and/or performant software.