This is just simply not so, or at best, the odds of writing a nontrivial bug free program in any language are negligible. Also, we are talking specifically of C, C++, and Zig here. Three compiled languages among hundreds.
There's a lot to like about Zig, especially related to metaprogramming. Unfortunately, bulletproof memory safety is table stakes for a modern language. Without a garbage collector or borrow checker, Zig is DOA for any use case that involves untrusted data.
Maybe there's a few niches (single player games?) that don't need memory safety...
For that better use D, Nim, Swift, C#, Go, designed from the ground up with one in mind, and whole ecosystem counts on it, instead of having coloured libraries.
By convention, all Zig libraries have functions that take an allocator as input from the user. Your application can use libgc[1] and pass the allocator to any library function you use, and not worry about deallocating afterwards.
The distinction I’ve heard is that Zig is a “better C” and Rust is a “better C++.” I haven’t done a lot of programming in any of these languages, but as an outsider it certainly seems apt.
These can be true, while at the same time, “Rust is a better C.”
Zig and Rust have a lot of the same and a lot of different stuff to offer. I drank the Rust koolaid, but I thought for a long time Zig or Nim would be the most popular C alternative.
It’s all about the macros, it seems. Rust’s macros are not the best in the world, but they are really good.
That's not a good analogy. Zig shares much blood with C, but Rust doesn't share much blood with C++. Though, from the complexity view, Rust can be viewed as another C++ (or C+++).
While it offers Modula-2 like safety, with a syntax more appealing to C developers, in the 21st century we expect a little more from a systems language.