What bothers me with C/C++ is how difficult it is to cross compile a simple Windows + SDL app from inside WSL without MSVC installed.
I've spent weeks on this.
If Zig saves me from that nightmare, and still lets me use C++ libraries, I will gladly switch over to it.
Fast forward a few decades to today and the best solution to cross-compile C/C++ projects is the Zig toolchain (and isn't that kinda weird? A "foreign" toolchain coming along fixing one of the biggest problems in the C/C++ ecosystem just like that as a "side quest"?)
We build for Linux and Windows on Linux using gcc/mingw and don't have any fundamental issues doing so. On macOS we need the headers & libraries for macOS, we have to do those inside a VM.
I'd be extremely surprised if you can cross-compile Zig for macOS on a non-macOS platform, unless it doesn't use any macOS native frameworks at any level.
From all that I've experienced in the past few weeks dealing with C projects and various build systems and operating systems, I suspect that using Zig would work perfectly as an easy cross-platform alternative to CMake. Until I open up my code in VS Code and the C/C++ plugin just doesn't work, no auto-completion, no go-to-definition, syntax highlighting is broken, etc., and all because it can't find the files in places it ordinarily expects them to be. And maybe there will be some hacky way to fix it with a setting for the VS Code plugin, but likely not.
I'm not saying this is the case, but literally none of the setups I tried feels non-hacky so far, and every one of them has at least one noticable problem during development. I truly miss the days of writing apps for a single platform using its own native build tools. Maybe that's what I'll do: write this as a native Windows app using Visual Studio (ugh, such an awful editor though) and then if I get sales, port it to Mac OS X 10 using Xcode.app, and compile it for Linux inside WSL with GCC 15.
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In fact, it exists in a world which contains "an ecosystem", tooling, opinionated build systems, various incompatible compilers, and mountains of legacy baggage, and all of these influence the daily experience of programmers using the language.