Zig looks nice
I would probably build something, likely an interpreter in Zig to get a feel for the language. From what I see, I’m hoping that it would feel similar to writing C but with a more modern syntax and a safer approach. I’m not sure about the verbosity in my first look though. Maybe, it’s not a big deal in practice.
Aesthetics wise, I really liked Nim for system programming. It has python-like syntax and it transpiles to C, C++ and JS. I wonder why it didn’t take off though compared to Zig or Rust.