D as a betterC a game changer ?

[John Gabriele]

On Wednesday, 27 December 2017 at 16:46:18 UTC, Russel Winder 
wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-12-27 at 08:59 +0000, Dan Partelly via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 
> […]
>> I could not agree more with this. It is unfortunate D has 
>> dependencies on a garbage collector in language proper and in 
>> std.
>
> Given the current situation, D's best route to traction is to 
> embrace GC and ignore all complaints other than "give us a 
> better GC". (*)
>
> It is all about differentiation. Forget competing against C, 
> C++, and
> Rust. D is the   C++ inspired language with GC that isn't Go.
>
>> […]
>
> (*) "Better C" is a specialist use case for Walter and the D 
> backend.

Although I don't know D very well yet, it sounds like Russel hits 
the nail precisely on the head here. FWICT, folks have lately 
used scripting languages (ex. Python, Perl, Ruby) for larger and 
larger programs (and even JS+Node for local apps), but it seems 
to me like the pendulum is swinging back the other way as 
everyone wants optional types and also JIT implementations like 
[PyPy](http://pypy.org/).

I think the D wiki would benefit from an article on how D 
competes-with/differs-from Go.

Also, as a related aside, another language that D competes with 
is Vala. Now that D is part of GCC, I wonder if D could replace 
Vala.