I think Zig would do better than Go at things like kernels, drivers, game engines, lower level sorts of things. Edited to add the obvious: SPIR-V, for instance.

Of course there’s lots of programming that can afford to pay for GC side effects, if there weren’t we wouldn’t have invented GC, but it’s a little less universal, a little less ‘system’.

For me, I came to Zig after horrible cross-platform experiences led me to try going all the way back to C and I found that I was spending way too much time learning to deal with accidental complexity instead of essential complexity. (Respect to the C masters but I failed to adapt.)

a lot of heavy duty systems have multiple allocator systems. the erlang virtual machine has 12:

https://www.erlang.org/docs/25/man/erts_alloc.html

jvm has at least 5:

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/hotspot/share...

postgres has at least 8:

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend...

since zig anoints an allocator interface in its stdlib, your (and the stdlib's) data structures which use allocators can be trivially reused across different allocation strategies without rewriting code; and very likely (not guaranteed ofc) if you bring in someone else's code they will cleave to convention.