In fact, Zig has pretty much the same support for strings as both Rust and Go. The primary difference which people seem to complain about, that "[]const u8" is not written as "string", can be solved by writing `const string = []const u8;` at the top of your program if you like.
Rust: `&str`, 'some bytes, and a length', 'Constructing a non-UTF-8 string slice is not immediate undefined behavior, but any function called on a string slice may assume that it is valid UTF-8, which means that a non-UTF-8 string slice can lead to undefined behavior down the road.' - also `String` and `OsString`.
edit: apparently Rust enforces that &str cannot be created with invalid UTF8, at the additional performance cost of runtime checks, so it has stronger guarantees than other languages like Go/Java/Zig/etc (as usual)
Go: `string`, 'in effect a read-only slice of bytes', 'a string holds arbitrary bytes. It is not required to hold Unicode text, UTF-8 text, or any other predefined format. As far as the content of a string is concerned, it is exactly equivalent to a slice of bytes.'
Zig: `[]const u8`, 'some bytes, and a length', 'Zig has no concept of strings', 'by convention parameters that are "strings" are expected to be UTF-8 encoded slices of u8.', 'Generally, you can use UTF-8 and not worry about whether something is a string.' - and the stdlib has functions for working with unicode and strings.
Rust: `&str`, 'some bytes, and a length', 'Constructing a non-UTF-8 string slice is not immediate undefined behavior, but any function called on a string slice may assume that it is valid UTF-8, which means that a non-UTF-8 string slice can lead to undefined behavior down the road.' - also `String` and `OsString`.
edit: apparently Rust enforces that &str cannot be created with invalid UTF8, at the additional performance cost of runtime checks, so it has stronger guarantees than other languages like Go/Java/Zig/etc (as usual)
Go: `string`, 'in effect a read-only slice of bytes', 'a string holds arbitrary bytes. It is not required to hold Unicode text, UTF-8 text, or any other predefined format. As far as the content of a string is concerned, it is exactly equivalent to a slice of bytes.'
Zig: `[]const u8`, 'some bytes, and a length', 'Zig has no concept of strings', 'by convention parameters that are "strings" are expected to be UTF-8 encoded slices of u8.', 'Generally, you can use UTF-8 and not worry about whether something is a string.' - and the stdlib has functions for working with unicode and strings.