Try reading zig code. For me its much more readable than the other languages, and does not suffer the fact go doesnt have language level errors. Local allocators are very useful and if you dont think so, perhaps you havent dwelved too deeply into systems programming or the language isnt targeted for you.

> why zig and not one of the others?

I think one of the selling points is that the language does not come to your way and allows unsafe constructs. So, I think the target audience is roughly at C and C++ users.

I think this blog post has a great description of the "Modern C" niche Zig fills: https://vfoley.xyz/hare/. I tend to think of Zig in this way. If you found yourself reaching for C, you could instead reach for Zig. You'd get optionals instead of null pointers, comptime instead of macros, a real facility for handling errors, etc. It's like C but with some of the sharp edges sanded off.

> What do people use zig for, and why zig and not one of the others?

I'm the maintainer of zigler (https://zigler.hexdocs.pm/Zig.html), and I have my own pharma startup. I currently use zig in two contexts:

1) wraps a proprietary .so file that is used to communicate with a scientific (microscope) digital camera, in a nice BEAM-module-shaped interface. Sorry, code is private.

2) I have a vue.js component that does DNA editing, and one of the features is DNA sequence alignment, and so I had claude write the smith-waterman lalign algorithm in zig, and it compiles to wasm, and this plus going from O(N^2) to O(N) dropped the runtime of an alignment from 30s to a few hundred ms, in both cases so much better than ~5m using a web SAAS, good enough that I can render alignments on-demand, and I don't have to do a storage layer for alignments.

https://github.com/Vidala-Labs/opengenepool/tree/master/src/...

you can play with it at:

https://opengenepool.vidalalabs.com

Two sequences may be aligned by right-clicking a sequence name when a sequence is loaded, it will align the two sequences (you'll have to create a second sequence as it forbids aligning a sequence with itself).

Why zig? Because it just makes things like cross-compilation easier (microscope is mounted on a elixir nerves deployment!), and has less footguns, and doesn't hide away things you might care about. Most of the things i build with zig don't really have a concern about memory safety, or have such trivial memory patterns that it's easy to verify by eye that they're memory safe.

C is over 50 years old, but it is still more or less the lingua franca of computing. The world benefits from having "C with some improvements from 50 years of learning". The world also benefits from having featureful languages that are a huge divergence from C, but it also just needs a language that provides a thin cross-hardware abstraction over the asm layer and some conveniences over writing raw asm. We don't need every language to be massively featureful, and we hopefully won't all have to reach for C for the rest of human civilization when we need a language that isn't massively featureful.

not really sure what you're asking. but time is now part of the io interface, so you can pretty easily write your own io implementation that just stubs out to the stdlib's default io content and has custom time functions if you want to try something funky. This is pretty close to what you are asking for (and in terms of functionality, equivalent). I say go for it and see what happens, report back!