Rust isn't that hard to learn. I teach it to college sophomores who only know Java, and within 2-3 months I have them writing parsers and interpreters in Rust. In fact these students are requesting our courses to be taught in Rust, and have never heard of Zig.
I think that while the language is a little complicated, this is tempered by how nice the tooling is. I consider the borrow checker to be my TA, as it actually helps the student write code that is structured better. When they go on to write C and C++ in later courses, their code is actually more memory safe due to having their habits having been shaped by Rust.
I think that while the language is a little complicated, this is tempered by how nice the tooling is. I consider the borrow checker to be my TA, as it actually helps the student write code that is structured better. When they go on to write C and C++ in later courses, their code is actually more memory safe due to having their habits having been shaped by Rust.