I really need to learn more about Zig, but from what I know, there are still worlds of possibilities that a modern, well-designed language offers over something like lib0xc. Zig's ability to evaluate any expression at compile-time is one such example.

But generally, lib0xc gives you bounds-safety everywhere it can. Languages like Zig and Rust give you type-safety to their own degrees, which I think is a superset.

> What do you think C would need in order to reach the user experience of those languages?

Not really having direct user experience, it's hard for me to say. But if I what I can give you is a list of features that would make large parts of lib0xc irrelevant:

1. Protocols/traits

2. Allocating from a caller's stack frame (think, returning the result of `alloca` to the caller)

3. printf format specifiers for stdint.h types and for octet strings

4. Ability to express function parameter lists as structures

5. New sprintf family that returns a value which is always less than or equal to the size passed (no negative values)

Basically, I think that the C standard should be working aggressively to cut down on the use cases for heap allocation and `void *`. And I think that the bounds safety annotations should become first-class language features.