Looking at the commit history of the Zig repo, the first commit was in 2016, so that can’t be right; Go hit 1.0 in 2012. Unless maybe it was just being talked about in 2012.
Either way, that’s still pretty new as far as languages go these days, and the bus factor still seems to be 1 or at best 3. There has to be some compelling reason that Zig was the choice here and I’m curious.