I don't really have much interest in Zig the language, but Zig as a standalone C/C++ compiler is pretty great.

I'm using it as a cross-compiler for linux-arm64 because its much simpler to download a single archive and extract it somewhere than to waste a bunch of time on guessing how each different Linux distro does ARM64 cross compilers (or doesn't in the case of Fedora).

Same for me.

The more Zig-the-language is hyped, the more I see it doesn't bring anything of interest. Zig-the-toolchain, on the other hand, is neat.

I’ve been using it for an embedded project to target arm thumb and the typical x86-64 hosts that communicate with a protobuf based protocol. It’s absurdly convenient to be able to just give windows users the repo, zig binary, and tell them to run ‘zig build’.

This is exactly how I've been using it the last couple years and it's incredibly nice.