Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[Walter Bright]

Rainer Deyke wrote:
> I want to throw these words back at you, because my first impression of
> D was "the bastard child of C++ and Java, with a random assortment of
> new features thrown in without rhyme or reason".  D is many things, but
> a simple and elegant language it is not.  (This is not a major problem
> to me, really.  I can live with messy languages.  I can live with C++.
> But to think that D is a massive improvement in this area requires a
> special sort of perspective.)

One measure of messy language semantics is the messiness of the compiler 
code needed to deal with it. D is a pretty clean language in comparison. <g>

Another way is measuring the change in source code size. I get about a 
30% reduction when translating C++ code more or less directly to D.

Yes, I think it is a massive improvement over C++ in simplicity and 
elegance. But if you try to write C++ code in D, you won't see as much 
of that as you would after being more used to the D way of doing things. 
For example, my early C code looked an awful lot like Fortran! It took a 
while before I used the language in a style that was natural for C. My 
first years of C++ code also looked a lot like just plain old C (in 
fact, it arguably still does).


> The reason I have stuck with C++ despite its (massive, obvious) flaws is
> that it has a couple of really nice and useful features that very few
> other languages have even attempted to match.  D is the only language I
> know that even tries, although it still falls short in many areas.

Fair enough. What are those two features?