I don’t want to get into a Zig-vs-Rust debate (nor should anyone!) but I did take some exception to this: > [Zig is a] slightly nicer C. There are plenty of la

I don’t want to get into a Zig-vs-Rust debate (nor should anyone!) but I did take some exception to this: > [Zig is a] slightly nicer C. There are plenty of languages like that. Are there “plenty of [actively supported] languages like that?” The design space of relatively simple, typesafe, imperative native programs strikes me as rather unexplored since the early 90s. At least I can’t think of many languages I would consider a nicer alternative to C - indeed actual C alternatives like Pascal and Fortran are arguably less nice. Maybe this is my ignorance. There are various languages “between” C and C++ in terms of abstraction and complexity, and the space of “somewhat C-like” languages is heavily explored (D, Java, C#, Objective-C, and in a different sense Ada or Swift). There are plenty of alternatives to C++. But Zig is one of the only ones that’s not dramatically more complex than ISO C. Happy to be corrected if I am missing something obvious (I mostly do functional programming).