The barrier to displacing any language is so high that you should consider such an endeavour to be a decades-long effort with a low chance of success. The best

The barrier to displacing any language is so high that you should consider such an endeavour to be a decades-long effort with a low chance of success. The best you can probably hope for is for something to live in a similar space and being large enough to be viable. Existing code and existing engineers are a massive barrier-to-entry. One trap engineers fall into is we tend to view exaggerate the importance of certain problems. Verbosity in Java is a big one. IDEs fill it in for you. It doesn't slow you down. It's a complete non-issue. Zig is interesting. I don't know a ton about it. My sense is that Zig is to C what TypeScript is to JavaScript. I mean Zig isn't transpiled into C but the point is that it seems to be very closely related so transition should be fairly easy. Rust most closely competes with C++ (IMHO) but it does something really interesting that C++ just can't do: it tackles ownership and memory safety at compile-time. Yes, C++ has smart pointers but these incur a runtime cost. C++'s features, history and (dare I say it?) baggage mean C++ can't do the same thing. I personally consider this to be an increasingly important issue so Rust has a definite niche. But will it displace C++? The odds aren't in its favor. But it will certainly be viable. C is the funniest one though. Asking "Will X replace C?" is a bit like "Will [search startup] replace Google?" The startup landscape is littered with the ocrpses of Google-killers. Likewise the language landscape is littered with the corpses of C-killers. So my money is on "no".