C and Python automatically concatenate string literals, and Rust has the concat! macro. There's no problem just writing it in a way that works correctly with any indentation. No need for weird-strings.

  " one\n"
  "  two\n"
  "   three\n"

I may be missing something but come Go has a simple:

    `A
       simple
          formatted
             string
    `

?

Significant whitespace is not difficult to add to a language and, for me, is vastly superior than what zig does both for strings and the unnecessary semicolon that zig imposes by _not_ using significant whitespace.

I would so much rather read and write:

    let x = """
      a
      multiline string
      example
    """

    let x =
      //a
      //multiline string
      //example
    ;

Here is a simple way to implement the former case: require tabs for indentation. Parse with recursive descent where the signature is

    (source: string, index: number, indent: number, env: comp_env) => ast

This can be implemented in under 200 lines of pure lua with no standard library functions except string.byte and string.sub.

It is common to hear complaints about languages that have syntactically significant whitespace. I think a lot of the complaints are fair when the language does not have strict formatting rules: python and scala come to mind as examples that do badly with this. With scala, practically everyone ends up using scalafmt which slows down their build considerably because the language is way too permissive in what it allows. Yaml is another great example of significant whitespace done poorly because it is too permissive. When done strictly, I find that a language with significant whitespace will always be more compact and thus, in my opinion, more readable than one that does not use it.

I would never use zig directly because I do not like its syntax even if many people do. If I was mandated to use it, I would spend an afternoon writing a transpiler that would probably be 2-10x faster than the zig compiler for the same program so the overhead of avoiding their decisions I disagree with are negligible.

Of course from this perspective, zig offers me no value. There is nothing I can do with zig that I can't do with c so I'd prefer it as a target language. Most code does not need to be optimized, but for the small amount that does, transpiling to c gives me access to almost everything I need in llvm. If there is something I can't get from c out of llvm (which seems highly unlikely), I can transpile to llvm instead.

Even if we ignore solutions other languages have come up with, it's even worse that they landed on // for the syntax given that it's apparently used the same way for real comments.

We can just use a crate for that and don't have to have this horrible comment like style that brings its own category of problems. https://docs.rs/indoc/latest/indoc/