For me, personally, it is nice because it's bare metal where I want it and not bare metal when I don't.
C is very basic and (especially when you stick to something like C99), can be very tedious to write. In C, if I hope for smarter things I need to write them by hand; usually there are no ways of achieving some goals without just crunching out the code. Zig preserves C qualities but also gives some extra tools that are completely optional and makes it less tedious than C.
I believe that Zig's popularity is also caused by general tendency of some people. Some prefer to fix a segfault than spend half a day refactoring something that was supposed to be easy but is causing half of the codebase to be rewritten.
(Oh, and Zig is also an escape hatch to easy CGo :))
C is very basic and (especially when you stick to something like C99), can be very tedious to write. In C, if I hope for smarter things I need to write them by hand; usually there are no ways of achieving some goals without just crunching out the code. Zig preserves C qualities but also gives some extra tools that are completely optional and makes it less tedious than C.
I believe that Zig's popularity is also caused by general tendency of some people. Some prefer to fix a segfault than spend half a day refactoring something that was supposed to be easy but is causing half of the codebase to be rewritten.
(Oh, and Zig is also an escape hatch to easy CGo :))