The new Zig implementation is certainly more well designed than the C++ implementation, for several reasons:
* It's the second implementation of the language
* It did not have to survive as much evolution and language churn
* I leveled up as a programmer over the last 7 years
* The Zig language safety and debugging features make it possible to do things I would never dream of attempting in C++ for fear of footguns. A lot of the data-oriented design stuff, for example, makes use of untagged unions, which are nightmarish to debug in C++ but trivial in Zig. In C++, accessing the wrong union field means you later end up trying to figure out where your memory became corrupted; in Zig it immediately crashes with a stack trace. This is just one example.
* Zig makes certain data structures comfortable and ergonomic such as MultiArrayList. In C++ it's too hard, you end up making performance compromises to keep your sanity.
Generally, I would say that C++ and Zig are in the same performance ballbark, but my (obviously biased) position is that the Zig language guides you away from bad habits where as C++ encourages them (such as smart pointers and reference counting).
As for less memory, I think this is simply a clear win for Zig. No other modern languages compete with the tiny memory footprints of Zig software.
Some of the projects I am exited to use Zig for:
* rewriting Groove Basin (a music player server) in zig and adding more features
* a local multiplayer arcade game that runs bare metal on a raspberry pi
* a Digital Audio Workstation
