I have been reading about this new language for a while. It's a C competitor, very slim language with very interesting choices, like supporting cross platform compilation out of the box, supports compiling C/C++ code (and can be used as a drop in replacement for C) to the point in can be used as replacement of (c)make and executables are very small.
But, like all languages, adoption is what makes the difference. And we don't know how it goes.
Is anyone actually using Zig right now? Any thoughts?
Is there a library being maintained that can handle the concerns?
Yes and no. Sure you can build a library that puts an encoding aware interface on top of strings, but it will cause friction every time the program interacts with something that does not subscribe to the same library, most notably probably the stdlib.