Similarly excited about Zig. While its memory safety guarantees may not be as comprehensive as Rust's, I hope we'll one day see Zig in the Linux Kernel. I suspect the old-time kernel C programmers may have an easier time with Zig than Rust.
zig currently uses LLVM but it wants to move away from that:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zig/comments/18x1wce/is_it_true_tha...
Once zig compiles Linux there are basically 3 compilers that can do so gcc, clang (llvm) and zig (less and less llvm).
I expect there to be good tools to port C code to zig (much hard for C->Rust), especially with the advancements in LLMs lately. I would not be surprised if that would result in a zig-linux code base in the coming 5 years. Sure the C based kernel may be the hot bed for innovation for years to come.