The thing that is provoking the switch is really in the "disruptive 10x better" areas, which Rust does offer around certain aspects of resource management. Zig is aligned around a different axis of "better", that axis being making a small-core, bootstrapping, C-compatible system. For the kernel project, the build-and-bootstrap problems were solved in an internal sense eons ago - there is a documented process. The process might not be particularly pretty or elegant, but switching won't make it 10x better.
On the other hand, small apps that need to "do things with bytes" and want to link to a bunch of dependencies have an appealing answer in Zig because it proposes solving their problem in systematic fashion.
I like Pascal, but the 10x isn't there: it could probably be 2-3x better than C for a lot of things, in the Dephi or FPC variants. It has the bits that people will "write C in C++" for, with much less WTF.
On the other hand, small apps that need to "do things with bytes" and want to link to a bunch of dependencies have an appealing answer in Zig because it proposes solving their problem in systematic fashion.
I like Pascal, but the 10x isn't there: it could probably be 2-3x better than C for a lot of things, in the Dephi or FPC variants. It has the bits that people will "write C in C++" for, with much less WTF.