tl;dr: A longtime Rust developer reimplemented a JSONPath library in Zig and shares observations: Zig's minimal IDE support pushed them toward CLI workflows, its flat file structure discouraged premature folder hierarchies, and its imperative style forced abandoning Rust's functional idioms in favor of in-place mutation. Manual allocator management is tedious but the TestAllocator catches leaks and double-frees that Rust prevents via Drop and ownership. Overall impression: Zig is fast, straightforward, and a plausible C successor, but the ecosystem is immature and the stdlib API still churns between versions.