Zig, a modern systems programming language, is often likened to coding in the mid-90s with its emphasis on control and lack of abstractions.
While Zig's philosophy of being in control of everything is respectable, it can lead to discomfort with raw pointers, manual memory management, cryptic errors, and poor ergonomics.
For those nostalgic for programming in C in the mid-90s, Zig may feel familiar, but for those aiming to develop modern, scalable, and user-friendly software, it might seem regressive.
Zig's insistence on manual control over memory allocation and deallocation, along with the absence of a garbage collector, implicit behavior, and secret memory allocations, places a heavy burden on the programmer.