Quora: Why hasn't D started to replace C++?

[Michael]

On Wednesday, 31 January 2018 at 07:56:37 UTC, Andrew Benton 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 30 January 2018 at 20:45:44 UTC, Andrei 
> Alexandrescu wrote:
>> https://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-D-started-to-replace-C++
>>
>> Andrei
>
> I think that the largest issue there is probably the marketing 
> and advocacy.  When Rust was about the same share as D, it had 
> much better marketing.  Someone was running their twitter 
> channel and working to make the language much more visible.  D 
> flat out doesn't have that.
>
> If I had to pick a second issue, it's that the ecosystem story 
> is hard compared to other languages.  New programmers aren't 
> certain what to choose or how to get their environment up and 
> running.  Compared against Rust, Go, and Java we have horrible 
> ecosystem fragmentation.  E.g. three compilers, two separate 
> languages for dub

I agree that marketing is a pretty serious problem for D. Many 
people just aren't aware of it. Even for people who do not 
program in the newer languages, Rust and Go are already well 
known to anybody who uses C# or C/C++ or Java, and even many 
Python or JavaScript programmers. D is often looked over and not 
visible enough on people's radars for them to even notice it, 
which is hugely disappointing as I've no doubt many would come to 
realise that it offers much of what they're looking for. 
Marketing is definitely failing the language here, but 
considering we don't have some huge company backing D, it's doing 
fairly well on its own. I just worry it's not enough to rely on 
word-of-mouth because it doesn't seem to be enough.

Personally I don't find the ecosystem to be a huge problem any 
more than C++'s is a problem. I can install DMD and LDC and, 
if/when I want/need to, I can tell rdmd to build using LDC. I am 
glad to have options, as I don't feel that they hinder my use of 
D.