Rust is such an amazing language, it's so safe and clean and beautiful and simple and clear to read and such wow community that are making amazing crates for cargo because cargo is so cool I like it so much so easy to....
Zig uses allocators, which will inform you if you are leaking memory.
Zig comes with defer/errdefer to simplify the resource cleanup (and for ergonomics).
Zig comes with Optionals to manage nulls.
Zig comes with slices (ptr + size) to manage all the bound-checking.
Zig automatically check for overflow/underflow arithmetic.
Zig will check for pointer alignments when casting between pointer types.
=> Zig is designed to make you do it right easily, and very hard to do it wrong.
In other words, Zig will let you be, but warn you when you are doing something wrong, where Rust is like Karen who is always screaming at you for every word you are typing.
To summarize, you really need to /want/ to fuck up to fail your memory management... If after all that you still can't manage your memory, it might be better for you to look for another carer.
Something is sure thou, Zig is very safe - just as it's safe to cut my veggies with a knife. I might cut a finger and bleed a little bit, but I will not use plastic knife "because it's safer".
Moreover; You are talking like if Rust is safe, all the time, which is not true in reality:
52.5% of the popular crates have unsafe code. Therefore, in an average real-world Rust project, you can expect a significant number of the dependent crates to have unsafe code
-- Source
Basically, you're comparing a hypothetical world where Rust is always safe to a superficial glance at Zig's capabilities to claim a "winner" here.
And for the String library... Are you fucking serious? Do you want to compare the Zig's Std library versus the famously tiny Rust Std library? Really?
"I was expecting [Rust] updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust," Torvalds said. "They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust." Torvalds added, however, that "another reason has been the Rust infrastructure itself has not been super stable."
-- Source [24-09-03]
I'm not sure that's something to be crowing about, mate...
Imagine the amount of dependencies for a project like that... That would fix the seg fault memory issue, but only to end up with an out of HD space issue.
Debian is a solid and a very popular distro. It's also the base distro of many other; there is a great selection of packages, an excellent package manager and it's well documented.
If you don't Frankendebian your box, Debian is one of the most, if not the most, stable distro out there.
It's a great place to learn, and since you already have experience with it, you're not starting from nothing.
I would also suggest you to stick with "stable" at the beginning. You will be tempted to switch for "testing", but believe me, stick to "stable" until you know what you are doing.
You have to change...
1- your default OS language (download all the language files, ZzZZz)
2- change the locale
3- apply the new locale to "all", which is the login screen, current user, new created user.
Go in regional settings and adjust if needed, then reboot with a USB drive on a distro of your choice,
1- go through the installation
2- update if needed
C wasn't my first language, but I learnt the most whilst learning C...
People are talking about footguns and what not security related issues. I agree it's easy to write bad C code, but if you want to learn what's going on, learn C.
Today I know a dozen of programming languages and C has always been in a special place in my heart. I am using Zig for my personal projects at the moment. It's similar to C, without the pitfalls, and my C knowledge still helped me to learn that language.
Learning C is a service you are doing to yourself for the rest of your life.
All party crpg like pillars of eternity, Baldur's Gate, and the like.
JRPG maybe...