D vs VM-based platforms

[Jascha Wetzel]

Ary Manzana wrote:
> Why? Because you already have most of the common
> functions and classes written for you: xml, streams, collections,
> network, etc. This also means that if your public method recieves a
> "List", because it's standard, everyone understands it quickly. Also the
> standard library can be improved, so each program improves as well.

This point is actually only about standard libraries, not VMs.
As i see it, VMs actually are only about portability. Portability in
theory also means better (more individual) code optimzation.
VMs also make compilers a lot simpler. the difficult, platform dependent
part of code optimzation lies in the VM.

Java and C# have pretty fat runtime environments that give them a lot of
versatility and eat a lot of resources. But little of that is actually
dependent on the VM concept.
Reflection can be done natively, as well (also see FlectioneD).