While I do like Zig, I would prefer automatic memory management for most application code. My priorities there are spending the least amount of effort and complexity on solving the problem, while ensuring the created code is both bug-free and maintainable, and am willing to give up some performance for that compared to raw C speed.

Zig seems to be a step back in that manner, even compared to C++ which at least has unique_ptr/shared_ptr.

For Pascal variants, way back when I used to enjoy writing Delphi, I think it was a great language, however I haven't been keeping up with the Pascal world.