[LexiMax]

Fair. I'm not a compiler developer, so I'll defer to your expertise on that front.

That being said, I suppose my ultimate wonder is how small a Zig implementation could possibly be, if code size and implementation simplicity was the priority. In other words, could a hypothetical version of the Zig language have existed in the 80's or 90's, or was such a language simply out of reach of the computers of the time.

[pron]

It's not quite as minimal as C, but it definitely could have been made in the 80s or 90s (actually, 70s, too) :) There were far larger, more complex languages back then, including low-level languages such as C++ and Ada, not to mention even bigger high-level languages. High-level languages were already more elaborate even in the 70s (comptime is no more tricky than macro or other meta-programming facilities used in Lisp in the sixties or Smalltalk in the 70s; it certainly doesn't come even remotely close to the sophistication of 1970s Prolog).

I don't think there's any programming language today that couldn't have been implemented in the 90s, unless the language relies on LLMs.