As far as I know, zig is the only language that is able to output binaries on par in size w/ C (a hello world in zig is about the same size as a C one, whereas most other languages can only manage at a minimum an order of magnitude bigger binaries, sometimes several orders of magnitude). Zig interops cleanly w/ C ABI and C toolchains, can also cross compile AND can cross compile C proper. You can even drop all the way down to asm (standard C technically doesn't support this).

I often refer to zig as a "very sharp knife": it's "cool" for new languages to have more safeguards to protect you from yourself, but Zig feels a bit like it goes in opposite direction in the sense that it exposes the underlying plumbing more than most languages. For example, Go and Rust memory allocations and memory layout are fairly opaque; in zig you can control it idiomatically with obsessive precision.

But unlike C, zig offers a host of safety features, like integer overflow checks, compiler-checked optionals and exhaustive switch, as well as a well behaved compile-time system, and a bunch of syntactical sugar ("method" syntax, if/while/block/return expressions, etc).

And unlike C++, zig is a very small language.