zig seems like someone wanted something between C and "the good parts" of C++, with the generations of cruft scrubbed out
rust seems like someone wanted a haskell-flavoured replacement for C++, and memory-safety
i would expect "zig for C++" to look more like D or Carbon than rust. and i'd expect "rust for C" to have memory safety and regions, and probably steal a few ocaml features
Not everyone likes RAII by itself. Allocating and deallocating things one at a time is not always efficient. That is not the only way to use RAII but it's the most prevalent way.
If you destroy an object that outlives the lexical scope it was created in, then you have to clean up manually.
comptime is a better version of C++ templates.
The power and expressiveness of the C++ compile-time capabilities are the one thing I strongly miss when using other languages. The amount of safety and conciseness those features enable makes not having them feel like a giant step backward. Honestly, if another systems language had something of similar capability I’d consider switching.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to have any examples of what you describe, where C++ is more powerful and expressive than Zig?
Talking about how much you can do with C++ templates made me think of that.