[dralley]

I'm not OP, but the typical answer is that the language is small enough to be understood by any engineer with a few weeks of training, and is pretty easy for anyone familiar with C to grasp the concepts of almost immediately.

This is something that you definitely can't do with C++ and probably can't do with Rust.

For some people it's more comforting to be able to understand the entirety of the language and focus on the complexities of the problem and the implementation than to have a slightly higher level and larger language taking over the details. It's the same reason people tend to like C over C++ or Go over other languages.

This also generally translates into a couple of technical benefits as well, such as much much faster compilers relative to more complicated languages like C++ and Rust.

Personally I still find Rust much more comfortable to write code in generally but I really appreciate the elegance of the Zig approach.