> It seems like from a language design perspective they've been made intentionally awkward

Awkward relative to what?

Relative to C? Did you look at my link to Fastbufs? Take a look at that and then get back to me how awkward Zig is relative to that.

Zig seems to be aiming to be a better C. Full stop. If you want abstraction, RAII and other higher-level stuff, C++ and Rust exist.

> If they are going to become that fundamental to core features of the language, I think a more ergonomic way to work them needs to be a higher priority.

I don't disagree. However, there have really only been two times so far that significant "interfaces" have churned like this (Allocgate and Writergate). Allocgate was driven by the fact that the previous implementation had real, measurable performance issues. Presumably, Writergate is being driven by similar problems. I'm actually really happy that someone is designing a language while paying very strict attention to the performance of both the compiler and the compiled code.

It's really hard to generalize until you get a couple of concrete examples under your belt. Trying to make an "interface" more ergonomic when it may get nuked from orbit in a couple of versions is kind of pointless.

I have plenty of gripes about Zig, but "interface churn" or "ergonomics" aren't very high on my list. I signed up for a language that is pre-1.0, so, while I may get annoyed, I also have to admit that I did this to myself.

> Zig seems to be aiming to be a better C.

Modula-2 and Object Pascal already did that for me, before I cared with C on MS-DOS, unfortunely one did not come with UNIX as selling point, and the other had the two industry giants that cared doing the wrong decisions.