Sorry for necrobumping this, but I came here through this OP comment. I was at PyCon Italy this week and Loris Cro (VP of community of Zig) gave a talk exactly about this. The live is here: the talk should start at 3:02:26 and lasts for some ~30 minutes.
Definitely not “extremely compact” but I wouldn’t bother over the size. It’s just a build-time dependency and the libraries that would benefit from that are already quite big. IIUC, this would also mean you have to run less VMs in your CI and install fewer dependencies from PyPI.