But by including the GC/runtime it went into a category with C# and Java which are much better options if you're fine with shipping a runtime and GC. Eventually Go showed up to crowd out this space even further.
Meanwhile in the C/C++ replacement camp there was nothing credible until Rust showed up, and nowadays I think Zig is what D wanted to be with more momentum behind it.
Still kind of salty about the directions they took because we could have had a viable C++ alternative way earlier - I remember getting excited about the language a lifetime ago :D
Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't?
What are some advantages of D over Rust (and vice versa)?
After all, D is supported by GCC and Clang and continually being maintained, and if updates stopped coming at some point in the future, anyone who knew a bit of C / Java / insert language here could easily port it to their language of choice.
Meanwhile, its syntax is more expressive than many other compiled languages, the library is feature-rich and fairly tidy, and for me it's been a joy to use.
A language with sane Compile Time features (Type Introspection, CTFE, mixins, etc)
A language that can embrace C ecosystem with sane diagnostics
A language that ships with its own optimizing code generator and inline assembler!
A compiler that compiles code VERY fast
A compiler with a readable source code that bootstraps itself in just 5 seconds
People who dunk on it "bEcAuSe iT Is nOt MaInsTrEaM" are clueless
Also, this presentation https://accu.org/conf-docs/PDFs_2007/Alexandrescu-Choose_You... killed a lot of bike shedding!
At the same time, I've never used it, I'm not sure why.
Anyway, the author of D language is here on HN (Walter Bright).
That "one thing" could be real or propaganda. Rust's one thing is writing "memory-safe" without GC. Eventually the marginal cost becomes too high or your are tricked by advertising and "graduate" from awk to perl. From there depending on the pull of the community or the actual utility of the language you will use it for more and more tasks. If the community pull is strong your programs start to look like line noise or boilerplate hell. If the utility for your problems is genuine they remain simple but you probably aren't producing the most efficient binaries.
As for why c programmers don't just use -betterc well some do, but for most people the reality is that can just do it in c and prefer c -> c++ (ofc the vast majority of projects just start as c++ which makes -betterC )
c++'s one thing c with objects.
If you learned to code writing Go what did you do?
If you learned to code writing D what did you do?
That's not to say you can't learn to code from writing D just that it discipline, most people don't even know a problem exists before they are already learning some language or tool, nor do they have the goal of building everything, most programmers are lazy they want to build the minimal amount and end up building everything by accident.
Why don't experienced devs use D then? They think if they strive for ideological purity that they won't "build everything" next time, or they just enjoy ideological purity as it's own mental exercises. Unix faithfuls want to show that computing can be (conceptually) simple in implementation and use. Rust programmers want to show that those simple (to use) unix programs can be (memory) safe. To a senior engineer D is just too good and easy to take.
Say your starting a new Staff Engineer or Tech Lead job. What gets you to convince a CTO that we need to have a team learn D ?
On the flip side, where are the 200k base salary D positions.
Get me an interview in 2 months and I'll drop 10 hours a week into learning
I would be happy if they released it without phobos.
Other than that it is excellent.
DMD does its job.
Ownership and borrowing are so much less baroque in D than in Rust. And compile times are superb.
In a better world, we would all be using D instead of C, C++ or Rust.
However in this age of Kali...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpM-Dvs8t0VZn81xEz6Ng...
Never has an old language gained traction, its all about the initial network effects created by excitement.
No matter how much better it is from C now, C is slowly losing traction and its potential replacements already have up and running communities (Rust, zig etc)