On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 08:55:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
D really needs its killer use case if it is to move away from that list.
D is a lot like Scala on the JVM: Both language have myriads of language features and bells and whistles, but there is no killer feature in the language itself. Rust and Go have that: Rust has safe manual memory management and Go has an excellent threading model with communicating sequential processes (aka goroutines). Scala didn't make it anywhere until Akka came along beind developed in Scala. Then came Play, Spark and Kafka - all developed in Scala.
Either the language has a killer feature or there must be a killer application written in it. For D the latter applies as it does not have a killer feature in the language. Build CSP into D or manual memory management as in Rust. CSP without a GC is difficult (that's one reason why Go has a GC) and Go has a very good GC.
I don't think marketing is a requirement. Rust and Go also received no big marketing. Their respective killer feature paved the way as those things were needed. Then people just take it and use it.
