Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[JN]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been 
> thinking about for a while...

No. It hasn't failed. However that's true, it doesn't have the 
wide recognition that say Go or Rust get at the moment. It's more 
behind the scenes, around the same level of popularity as Nim, 
Crystal. Also, D community doesn't frequent places like Reddit 
often, most of the activity is done here in forum or through 
Github issues for relevant projects. Still, when a project 
related to D shows up on /r/programming it often brings a lot of 
curiosity or people saying that they use D, it's just they don't 
have anything to show for it yet.

But even these languages are not as popular as one would think. I 
work as a programmer, I often talk to my coworkers and they look 
at me funny when I mention languages like D, Dart, TypeScript, Go 
or Rust. They only know C, C++, Java, Javascript and C#, other 
languages don't exist to them.

I don't think D will explode in popularity in the future. D isn't 
a very opinionated language. It's working through evolution 
rather than revolution. It's based around stable growth rather 
than flashy features.

It could be argued though, that some of the design decisions are 
slowing the growth of the language. For example the whole 
GC/runtime thing makes it hard to deploy to web/webassembly, an 
area that Rust is actively conquering right now. Sure, we have 
betterC, but it's not really helpful in this case.