Zig seems to be awesome at creating mixed environs of zig for new code and C for old, and translating or interop, plus being a C compiler.
There must be some very good reasons why Linux kernel maintainers aren't looking to zig as a C replacement rather than Rust.
I don't know enough to even speculate so would appreciate those with more knowledge and experiencing weighing in.
Zig has much better interoperability with C than Rust, but it’s not memory safe or stable. I think we’ll see quite a lot of Zig adoption in the C world, but I don’t think it’s in direct competition with Rust as such. In my region of the world nobody is adopting Rust, the C++ people are remaining in C++. There was some interest in Rust originally but it never really caught on in any company I know of. Likely for the same reason Go has become huge in younger companies but will not really make its way into companies which are traditionally Java/C# because even if it made sense technically (and it probably doesn’t) it’s a huge change management task. Zig is seeing traction for programs without the need for dynamic memory allocation, but not much beyond that.