Rust is the only mainstream language I know of that's memory-safe without the overhead of GC or reference-counting. Doing that is really hard, and compromises t

Rust is the only mainstream language I know of that's memory-safe without the overhead of GC or reference-counting. Doing that is really hard, and compromises the dev experience, so I'm not sure I'd call it "the macro trend", outside of the uptake of Rust itself. It has tradeoffs Zig and some other languages like Nim have taken a different approach: "If we don't try to fully solve memory safety, what are all the other ways we can improve on the status quo to make a decidedly modern systems language?" Modern tooling, colocating arrays with lengths, strings as first-class citizens, error types, nullable types that the compiler can reason about, better static types and inference in general, etc. There's a whole lot of room for improvement over C even if you're not going all the way to borrow-checking More on Zig's level of safety: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/