When I say "Rust alternative" it's precisely because it competes in the same space: very low-level, no GC, extremely high performance constraints, safety guarantees.

Re: safety guarantees, much digital ink has been spilled on how Zig can give Rust a run for its money when it comes to safety.

When people say: Rust <=> C++, Zig <=> C; they forget that C++ was precisely meant to be an enhanced C, which is what Zig is trying to accomplish. They simply eschewed chasing complexity as the holiest of holy grails, which in turn leads to the cognitive load of writing/reading Zig code to be MUCH smaller than C++ or other langs in that space.

All that said, I'd never recommend a company build their product on Zig just yet, at least not with some kind of red telephone to the Zig team or a dedicated Zig developer, given it's still not fully mature.

Re: managing memory yourself, Zig's defer makes this much, much more straightforward than you would think, and feeding in your own allocators can simplify this in many cases (and make testing for leaks much easier).