I've evaluated D for games. It's good in terms of giving you a palette of data modelling options from "I don't care yet" to "I need to track every byte", and ha

I've evaluated D for games. It's good in terms of giving you a palette of data modelling options from "I don't care yet" to "I need to track every byte", and having the support of multiple compiler implementations gives it a trustworthy "not going to disappear" feeling. You really don't have to lean on the GC given all the other options for memory management, but it is the canonical default and is likely to stay that way unless everyone keeps piling on the -betterC train. However - it's another big language with a lot of accumulated history to it and a lot of stuff that isn't immediately needed in the day-to-day. That makes it intimidating to learn and more geared towards "megacorp" codebases when I really want something small and suitable for hobby/education projects that go near the metal. So I've also searched for a dedicated "better C" which led me to Zig. It's still in its early stages so it doesn't face the tightrope act of D development. And the language is uncomplicated, polishing up pretty much every wart and major source of error that's in C(even manual memory stuff - not by eliminating the footguns, but by making safe usage idioms easy), while playing really well with existing C code.