Seeing this, and the use of zig for https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle I wonder if zig might become a good tradeoff vs rust for servers if in long term it's more readable and maintainable and with a different approach to quality.

I would also be interested to hear the compile time, binary size and memory usage of those example apps.

Looks like the underlying facil.io library hasn't seen any commits since 2021, so that's a bit of a red flag. https://github.com/boazsegev/facil.io