Interesting essay. Small suggestion for the author -- if you're going to include references to code elsewhere, and prompt me to go read it, like

> the build binary is defined in lib/std/special/build_runner.zig. It isn’t complicated and I recommend you read the file.

it would be very helpful if that was actually a link to the repo.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig

The code in the lib/std directory is very readable, and I’d strongly encourage checking it out for anybody who wants to learn Zig or know what idiomatic Zig looks like.