This is a hot take, but programming languages haven't progressed since the 90's. We've been conditioned to believe that if you want to be a serious programmer, you have to either use C++-style RAII (which includes Rust), or garbage collection, and there's no in-between, and C programmers are dinosaurs who can be ignored.

Arena allocators are a great way to automatically manage memory allocations. You malloc a whole bunch of memory and release it all with a single free, which makes it much easier to reason about your program's memory safety.

Casey Muratori has a good video talking about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1KNDmOYqA

And about Zig, you have an Arena Allocator out of the box: https://zig.guide/standard-library/allocators/ . And it's not just limited to that, you have debug allocators that detects memory leaks and gives you stack traces where they occurred.

This isn't to say that Zig is great at everything. I think Rust is great for things like kernels, high-frequency trading systems, and authentication servers where memory safety and performance is paramount. But for things like video games, memory leaks and buffer overflows aren't that big of a deal, and Zig's "Good Enough" approach is great for those types of applications.

Zig does in fact do some stuff to address memory management like making allocations more explicit using allocators and shipping with arenas.