I don't understand where that came from. It's really a replacement for C. The place where complexity comes from in zig is pretty much the comptime type system

I don't understand where that came from. It's really a replacement for C. The place where complexity comes from in zig is pretty much the comptime type system, which is emergent from the idea of replacing irregular consteval rules for C and replacing preprocessor macros I would say that Zig is: C - {make, autoconf, etc., preprocessor, UB[0]} + {*defer, !, ?, catch/try, "async"[1], alignment, comptime} I don't think that rises to the level of "C++ replacement". Maybe it's that comptime lets you do generics a la C++ templates? [0] by default, in zig you can have UB for performance [1] in quotes because async is not actually async, it's a control flow statement that is usually and most usefully used to do async things.