Asked on Reddit: Which of Rust, D, Go, Nim, and Crystal is the strongest and why?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 9 June 2015 at 18:53:06 UTC, Dennis Ritchie wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 June 2015 at 18:46:48 UTC, Israel wrote:
>> Ruby that compiles?
>
> Yet Rust, Nim and Crystal is a very young languages. And alas, 
> life is not eternal to wait five years of a flourishing 
> language :) There are already ready to be used option. This is 
> D.

Yes, Nim and Crystal have a couple of more years to go. Rust has 
been backed by Mozilla for 6 years and is being used in 
production projects, so I would not downplay the potential 
uptake. I think Rust has an advantage over Go in the name Mozilla 
alone, they are more idealistic than Google.

But the Rust memory model will be hard on many programmers, also 
game programmers who don't want a "single-threaded memory model", 
so D can reach a non-Rust segment over time by focusing on 
ease-of-use. I think D needs to change focus to get there though, 
like tweaking the semantics to support faster/local GC and 
perhaps even move to benchmark-driven design.

I don't really think people pick an AoT language because of 
meta-programming. There are so many semi/dynamic languages with 
excellent meta-programming-capabilities.