Has anyone else come across the programming language Zig?
https://ziglang.org/
It's being developed as a replacement for C and it has good interoperability with C libraries. It has some interesting features like the way it handles errors.
I had a quick go at using it with Allegro - I just translated the ex_blit example. This was fairly straightforward and performance was similar to the original. However I'm not convinced it was a massive improvement either, although I'm sure if it were written as a Zig program (rather than a conversion) it would make better use of the features.
Have a look here:
https://github.com/pedro-w/zigallegro/blob/master/src/main.zig
(also, it does have coroutines, so David will be happy!)

Good to hear you've been working with Zig. I found it a bit tricky as the docs are not great and it's still being changed frequently. For example it's not possible to pass or return ALLEGRO_COLOR by value because of some limitations in the compiler which are due to be fixed in the future. I suspect in my zig code I've done things which are weird just because I wasn't sure of the optimal way to do them.
I don't know Rust but I think the zig syntax bears a superficial resemblance to it, what do you think?

I think Zig is the first C replacer that actually convinces me. I should test it.

Zig is love, Zig is life. Wren is kinda also the same, but I always use C, it's my Goto unless I can't think of a solution in C and I have to choose the wicked C++. Even then I don't easily go for Zig and other languages for some reason.

I've never heard of Zig before. That's exciting!

Though I already think of Rust as a C killer. And it is pretty neat too.

I hope people have interoperability on their radar so that code written in one is linkable and callable from another. Just to save on the square wheels.

It's this section:
Export functions, variables, and types for C code to depend on

For example, in my conversion of ex_blit to zig mentioned above, I have here

export fn user_main(argc: c_int, argv: [*c][*c]u8) c_int {
    if (!a5.shim_init()) {
        abort_example("Could not init Allegro.\n");
    }
...

which is called by al_run_main (a C function) from Zig's own main. The signature of that function is the Zig equivalent of int user_main(int argc, char* argv[]) which will be familiar to you.