Zig looks neat; a nice middle ground, not as preachy as Rust -- I took a stroll through the documentation but didn't get a sense from it how suitable it would be for baremetal or OS programming... Specifically about its standard library..

  * How dependent on libc is Zig, if at all?
  * What kind of runtime expectations does Zig have? Does it need a malloc, for example? 
  * How big is its standard library?
  * Is it possible to write code without its standard library?

- Zig has no hard dependency on libc, it's the user's choice whether he wants to link it or not. It ships musl libc and can build/link it for most (all?) supported targets.

- Most of Zig's standard library works on freestanding targets. No runtime needed. There are no implicit allocators, so the user must use an allocator shipped with the standard library or implement their own.

- Standard library is still in its early days but already provides a lot of functionality out of the box, from containers to io.

- Using the standard library is optional. When it is used, only what is used gets included. The standard library is built from source every time (though there is caching) and its semantic analysis basically does LTO in the codegen stage so you end up with pretty slim binaries.

Here's a couple of examples:

- https://github.com/andrewrk/clashos

- https://github.com/AndreaOrru/zen