I'd be perfectly happy if the answer to TFA's question was "nothing". Zig has the minimalism of something like C89 or Lua. It has a syntax like C. It has compil

I'd be perfectly happy if the answer to TFA's question was "nothing". Zig has the minimalism of something like C89 or Lua. It has a syntax like C. It has compile time execution (as per TFA) like all sorts of languages mentioned in the comments. Etc. There isn't really anything particularly unique about it. Who cares? It feels to me like zig is an example of something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Really the only thing I don't think I've ever seen before is how zig passes around memory allocators. And that's probably because I'm not a systems programmer by trade, so I'm less familiar with that sort of thing.