Zig is too uninteresting to eclipse anything. It's the same problem as D's -betterC option. It's not better-enough to motivate switching away from C in places where C is still used, and it's far too stripped down & basic to attract the majority that's gone to C++, Rust, Go, ObjC, or Swift (or even "full" D). It doesn't offer much to justify switching costs. If C++11 had never happened then maybe Zig would attract the C++ crowd, but today?
Zig also seems far too opinionated & even self-contradictory. Like no hidden control flow means that you can't have operator overloading because apparently the + operator is invisible to people or something. And if it could be overridden it could call a function (gasp!) or throw an exception (double gasp!), followed immediately by a big section about how the + operator internally is hidden control flow and can throw an exception (overflow checking).
It then also constantly claims itself as being small & simple, but it has compile-time reflection & evaluation for templated functions - which is widely considered the main complexity of C++. I think Zig is better overall having this feature, I love constexpr & friends in C++, but compile-time code generation & evaluation over generic types is also not "simple" nor "small".
Zig also seems far too opinionated & even self-contradictory. Like no hidden control flow means that you can't have operator overloading because apparently the + operator is invisible to people or something. And if it could be overridden it could call a function (gasp!) or throw an exception (double gasp!), followed immediately by a big section about how the + operator internally is hidden control flow and can throw an exception (overflow checking).
It then also constantly claims itself as being small & simple, but it has compile-time reflection & evaluation for templated functions - which is widely considered the main complexity of C++. I think Zig is better overall having this feature, I love constexpr & friends in C++, but compile-time code generation & evaluation over generic types is also not "simple" nor "small".