Those are nice taglines, but while Rust is a safer C++ in the sense that it is a language that espouses C++'s design philosophy and has a similar feel to it, Zig is something new altogether. The only thing that makes it more similar to C than to C++ is that C is an extremely simple language, as is Zig, while C++ is an extremely complex language. But other than that, Zig is a low-level language that is its own family, and with a design that is radically different from either C or C++; it's hard to compare it to anything, really. Zig goes well beyond C in its power of abstraction to match C++/Rust, but it does so in a very different way than C++/Rust.

The safety guarantees of Rust are much stronger than Zig's. For example Rust statically prevents use-after-free and data races, and Zig doesn't (and I don't think anyone expects it ever to). To me this matters more than which one is more like C or C++ (partly because I don't think Rust is very much like either).

> C programmers will be more excited by Zig than by rust

I'm a C programmer. I haven't touched C++ since before C++11 became a thing, and I prefer C to C++. I'm much more excited by Rust.

It's interesting people keep saying this. I see Rust as being much closer to C than it is to C++. Rust is safer C with the bare minimum of added advanced features.