Language-level guarantees of memory safety are not critical to all low-level programmers, and sometimes this is fine!

Developers of games, compilers, digital audio workstations, video editors, and live performance software (such as openFrameworks) likely don't rank memory safety as their top concern.

Zig is already an attractive choice for those domains because it offers:

- Great compile times compared to C++/Rust, and future plans to implement hot reloading as a core part of the tooling: https://www.jakubkonka.com/2022/03/16/hcs-zig.html

- The ability to reason about where data exists in memory: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Where-are-the-byte...

- Good readability and learnability, especially if you have a C/C++ background.

- Comptime that enables clean generics, compile-time reflection and general metaprogramming as a happy side-effect: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-is-zig-comptime/

- Better tooling than C/C++. The ability to cross-compile Zig and C/C++ from one machine lets you set up much more stable and reproducible build environments already. You can clone zig-gamedev and have the demos working with just three commands on Windows/macOS/Linux, for example, and two of those three are cloning the repo and changing to the directory: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev (to build the examples you will need the latest copy of Zig from the 'master' section for your platform at https://ziglang.org/download/ )

We should all be careful about insinuating that memory unsafe languages should not exist. I see “friends don't let friends use memory-unsafe languages” on social media and feel sick. It's much healthier to embrace the melting pot of Zig, Odin, D, Beef, Vale, Hare, V, Lobster, Jai, C3, Val, Roc and all the rest and see what new ideas and trade-offs they bring.

Also worth noting that new languages tend to take time to develop their own philosophies to memory safety (Vale's approach is only just now emerging, for example: https://verdagon.dev/blog/making-regions-part-1-human-factor ). Others take years to gradually improve and develop techniques for better memory safety (like D). Zig's story might not be as good as Rust's ( https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ ), but then it's not Zig's priority at the moment, and Zig's full story is not yet written. Even if Zig's safety features don't improve further between now and 1.0, it already has great value as a language.