After I wrote Why Zig Over Rust for Systems Programming, the obvious next question was C. The Rust question was about safety and how much ceremony I was willing to accept for it. The C question is different, because Zig and C want the same things. Both are small languages without a Garbage Collector and both stay close to what the machine does. So this post is not about leaving C for something completely different. It is about the parts of C that cost me time and how Zig deals with them. All the code was compiled on a Mac with Zig 0.17 and clang.