I don't really think much of Zig myself for other reasons, but comptime seems like a good design.
Is that the case? That's not what I think of when I think of C-style casts.
float val = 12.4;
int val_i = (int) val;
Maybe you're thinking of aliasing/type-punning? Casts in C do perform conversions as they do in C++.
The point is that certain casts/type conversions can change the underlying data.
> like the int with value 3 landing in memory after calling atoi("3").
That's something else entirely. People may colloquially call this "converting a string to an integer", but what we're realling doing here is parsing a string as an integer.