Having worked on hash table implementations in C, and having done everything to minimize cache misses, e.g. using tiny 8-bit bloom filters within a cache line to avoid further cache line probes, I now prefer Zig to C, because I believe it makes memory alignment far more explicit in the type system.

You can even align the stack memory for a function and this is all upfront in the documentation. You don't need arcane compiler specific pragmas. Zig just makes it easy. Zig's alignment options are so powerful and neat and available compared to C, right down to allocations with custom alignments, and all first class at the language level. Compare that with C's malloc() and posix_memalign(). Implementing a Direct IO system in Zig recently was also a breeze.

I also appreciate Zig's approach to memory management, where even the choice of allocator is considered important, and for things like async/await, Zig's explicitness around memory requirements is brilliant. Zig's @frameSize builtin (https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.7.1/#frameSize) will tell you exactly how much memory a whole chain of functions will need to run async, including their stack variables. You can even choose where you want their async frames to be stored: global, heap or stack.

Again and again, Zig's design decisions have just been spot on. Huge kudos to Andy Kelley and the Zig communities.