[stratts]

What's the state of the art here?

Most of Zig's safety, or lack thereof, seems inherent to allowing manual memory management, and at least comparable to its "C replacement" peers (Odin, C3, etc).

[ArtixFox]

I guess formal verification tools? That is the peak that even rust is trying to reach with creusot and friends. Ada has support for it using Spark subset [which can use why3 or have you write the proofs in coq] Frama-C exists for C. Astree exists for C++ but i dont think lone developers can access it. But it is used in Boeing.

[pjmlp]

Comparable to Modula-2 and Object Pascal, hence why those languages ought to do better.

Otherwise it is like getting Modula-2 from 1978, but with C like syntax, because curly bracket must be.