It can be memory safe. It's up to you to choose memory safety or not. That's a piece of what I was getting at. Unless I misunderstand something. I've only dabbled with Zig.
I'm not aware of any memory safety that works in Zig, other than maybe Boehm GC. The GeneralPurposeAllocator quarantines memory forever, which is too wasteful to work in practice as one allocation is sufficient to keep an entire 4kB page alive.