I agree that there's a lot to like about Zig (the module system and error management are the two I mainly consider superior to Rust's approach for example) but

I agree that there's a lot to like about Zig (the module system and error management are the two I mainly consider superior to Rust's approach for example) but I wouldn't say it's easy to stay safe without thinking about it. Quite the contrary actually. Rust sometimes forces you to add annotations which certainly can get unwieldy at times (I think this in particular trips a lot people because sometimes they know what they want to tell the compiler but don't know how to express it in Rust speak and thus anger ensues). Zig, on the other hand, doesn't require any of that and makes code look simple and arguably more pleasant in comparison, but it doesn't mean the "contract" between objects goes away. It's just not expressed in code and checked by the compiler but rather by the person writing the code. Take [0] for example. The compiler (at least in the current stage, it's at 0.11 after all) is perfectly happy with code which returns a pointer to a stack allocated memory from a function. The fix is to remember that you need to pass the argument via pointer and not let the compiler decide for you. But what if the programmer forgets or somebody else is working on the code? [0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/17419 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/17419