You might like making and freeing every heap allocation but that doesn't mean it's safer. Every other language would be in the category of 'hidden heap allocations' to a much greater degree. People who understand it don't feel that it is 'spooky'.
I didn't say it was safer, but by "safety" here I don't mean something that will likely work, but an absolute guarantee that it will regardless of what client code does (with the exception of clearly marked unsafe code that's easily found). C++ doesn't offer this kind of safety for pretty much anything.
So we're talking about the likelihood of making a mistake - and of not easily finding it - in the absence of safety. Without any empirical data, all we have to rely on is personal preferences and gut feeling, and those are different from one person to the other. Even expert programmers often violently disagree on what's "better", and I think that's because things can be better or worse for different use cases, but also better or worse for different programmers working on the same problem.
I would like there to be more empirical studies, but I also think we can probably live without them, because software is such an important economic activity that it's under significant selective pressures. If one approach significantly decreases the effort of delivering more value in software, it will spread almost universally (e.g. as unit tests have); the converse is that if something doesn't become universal, then it probably doesn't have a large universal impact.
No, you didn't. You wrote "You might like making and freeing every heap allocation but that doesn't mean it's safer." That is a very different claim (and one I didn't make) than "Zig is safer than C++".
Zig is safer than C++ because it makes some absolute guarantees that C++ doesn't, and C++ doesn't make any absolute guarantees that Zig doesn't. But no memory leaks is not a guarantee that either Zig or C++ make.
Zig and Rust guarantee that all Zig and Rust programs are free of out-of-bounds access (unless they explicitly use syntactically distinct "unsafe" operations). C++ makes no guarantee about all C++ programs that these two other languages don't make.
To what degree that matters is a perfectly fine subject for debate, but that particular thing - again, important or not - is how I (and others) define "safety" (as it pertains to a language), and I made it clear that that's the definition I'm using.
By that definition, memory leaks are not safe in C, C++, Zig, or Rust, but Zig is still safer than C++ because of other properties that are safe in Zig.
