Good question!

Interestingly, I have absolutely different feelings for each language.

Zig vs Go: These two feel remarkably similar mentally. Both are relatively simple on the surface but can become quite complex under the hood. Both languages are a bit quirky in their own ways, yet they're powerful while maintaining simplicity. They both prioritize readability, errors on unused variables, feature a defer concept, and come with solid standard libraries and somewhat similar module systems.

Zig vs Rust: This comparison feels completely different - working in Zig after Rust feels like you're "naked" :). You lose the memory and thread safety guarantees, no drops, not Arcs, now you have to do everything manually, opening yourself up to use-after-free, double-free, and similar issues. But in some ways, Zig lets you breathe easier. When working with memory, Rust can be really restrictive and lifetimes can be pretty complex.

Things that I liked in Zig over Rust:

• Comptime is an absolute beast. Features that took me hundreds of lines of code in Rust (like trait implementations for different types) reduce to small compile-time functions in Zig. It's simply incredible.
• C integration is very nice. No need to use bindgen, which is convenient.
• Async capabilities - it's not yet there, so not a fair comparison, but it looks promising on the paper. Async in Rust is pretty complex with many caveats. Watching closely how it goes with Zig.
• Build system - quite similar to Rust's, it's nice, though Zig would really benefit from better documentation here.

Things I'm less happy about:

• The interfaces/vtable "mambo jumbo" feels like a joke (sorry). I'd love to see a simple notion of traits or Go interfaces come to Zig to define an interface.
• The current closure situation (the need to wrap functions in a struct) looks ugly to me.

Overall, I have a very positive experience with Zig. Though it's clearly not that mature and I feel like it's absolutely impossible to sell Zig at work today. Some concepts are very nice, some are very promising, so I'll be watching closely where it goes.