If Zig were a high-level language it wouldn't have been so impressive. There are plenty of simple high-level languages. But in low-level domains there is a lot of extra accidental complexity because you need to precisely define layout, control memory allocation and placement, and try to avoid, or at least control branches or dynamic dispatch. And you need to do all that in the worst-case, and you don't have a JIT. So far there have been two approaches -- C, which is linguistically simple but inexpressive and spectacularly unsafe, and C++/Ada/Rust, which is much safer and much more expressive but incredibly complex. Zig finds a new way, not through some magic, but through really exceptional and radical design.
But low-level languages also get translated by a parser so I don't see the difference.. Maybe you mean that languages has less abstractions and because of this simplier translations? Think I need to try Zig out to get a grip on it..
I mean that in low-level languages the name of the game is how to work with low-level details, and Zig's design makes it exceptionally pleasant as it uses the same language for those details as it does for the logic. There is no magic here, just very clever and careful design.
