alt Hacker NewsFirst of all C did not had any generics, so same playing field.
C has a runtime, even if tiny. That is what calls into main(), handles floating point arithmetic when none is available, functions that run before and after main(), nowadays also does threading.
Heap memory handling in Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, is much safer than C, first of all no need to do math to calculate the right size, arenas are available on the standard library, dinamic allocation can also be managed by the compiler if desired (Ada), pointers are safe as they by default must be used with existing data, however if one really wants to do pointer arithmetic it is available.
The only issue that they have in regards to C, is the use-after-free, but that apparently isn't an issue for folks moving away from C into Zig, wich is basically Modula-2 with some C syntax flavour.
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In Pascal (not the original Pascal standard, but, say, Turbo Pascal), could you allocate a variable-sized array of something, and still have index protection when using it?
(I know quite well that C couldn't. Even a C++ vector may or may not, depending on which access method you use.)
C uses pointer casts all over the place to fake generics. If you don't have that (in Pascal or MODULA-2) then life becomes very unpleasant.
There is a quite a bit of C code that makes creative use of the size of allocations. For example linked lists with a variable sized payload. Again one of the things that would prevent a C programmer from switching to Pascal.
I don't expect the Zig user base to become larger than the Rust user base any time soon. But we have to wait and see, Zig is quite young.