With C, if you can understand the lifetime of variables on the stack, how to manage pointers to the memory allocated on the heap, etc, it'll help with learning

With C, if you can understand the lifetime of variables on the stack, how to manage pointers to the memory allocated on the heap, etc, it'll help with learning Rust, Zig, etc. Implementing your own malloc/free, memory arenas, reference counting, vtables, etc, and doing so all in C will lead to a concrete understanding of how these features work in other languages and ultimately to more intuitive designs and implementations.