I think Zig's biggest advantage is that it's just C without the warts, or footguns as is said in the Zig world. The comptime feature is probably the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. I've looked at Rust and feel it's more of a competitor to C++, Java and C#. Whereas Zig is C done right.
"Rust is a competitor to C++, not C" is a meme, and there's some truth there, but I don't think it's all that accurate. I know lots of folks who prefer C to C++, but still like Rust.
I do think that these sorts of language comparisons are useful, but they don't always generalize. Partially this is because what a language means to each person can vary. As long as they're understood in a very coarse grained way, I think they can still make sense, but it's tricky!
I'm one of those, but, any way, Rust is mainly competitor for C++, while no-std Rust (or Core Rust) is direct competitor for C.
I did fairly large and complex program in Rust for bicycle computer, and, while I like developer ergonomic, speed, and memory usage, I'm disappointed by the total size of the binary, number of dependencies used, and compilation time.
Have you researched this space already[1]? By default Rust doesn't optimize for the resulting binary size, but there are lots of things that can be done to bring size down where you'd expect.
> number of dependencies used
When this comes up it becomes as much a technical discussion as a philosophical one :)
> and compilation time.
No arguments there. There are some things that can be done in your project to avoid spending too much time (simplify bounds to minimize recalculation in the type system, avoid proc macros, leverage cfg conditional compilation), but they are work arounds.