The main reason Zig was chosen is because the project was started at a hackathon[0] at which there was a prize for "best use of Zig". Beyond that there were also other reasons: 1. I have been wanting to try out Zig 2. It fit the requirement of being a so called "systems language".
However having written it in Zig I have a few retroactive reasons for why Zig was a good choice (if not the best choice):
* The build system allows to make the runtime a dependency of the "compiler". I don't think any other language has that.
* The interoperability with C/systems calls is amazing (in comparison to anything but C/C++)
* The ability to embed files
* Makes it incredibly easy to make static binaries
