Comment by kllrnohj

> written in C [..] tooling and game engines (which you said are a poor fit for manual memory management)

Game engines moved to C++ over 20 years ago.

Most major compilers are also in C++, including GCC (it switched over a decade ago). Which means the two largest C compilers are themselves not written in C. They have un-bootstrapped.

> That all said, I do agree that manual memory management is really hard to do if you are used to just sweeping gigabytes of memory under rug, hoping the GC vacuum cleaner slurps it afterwards. It takes a mindset and a set of practice. But once you internalized it, it becomes second nature.

Sorry, but no, you cannot internalize this. Nobody can. Once a program grows past some point, purely manual memory management & "git gud" are simply not practical. The amount of evidence against this is beyond any doubt.

Zig's emphasis on cross compilation seems like it's a better fit for embedded than anything else, which is where things shouldn't realistically grow to be huge projects, but with how coding efficiency (or lack thereof) works today along with microcontrollers getting ever more powerful... who knows.