- It's a very low level language. Having written mostly Python for the past few years, it is quite the contrast. I had to force myself to think in C to get the train going
- Getting my head around the error handling took more time than I'm willing to admit. In the end, it's like having exception but being more explicit about it. It feels nice when you get the hang of it
- The documentation of the standard library is severly lacking, to be fair the language is still very young. More worrysome, it feels very cluncky.
- No proper string support. It is sad that a modern language still goes down that route after Python has shown that correcting this is both definitely worthwhile and a word of pain.
- I have the feeling that optional and error union types are a bit redundant, but I have not written enough Zig to have a real intuition on that. Maybe it is just that I understand monads now.