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

[Chris]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:50:42 UTC, SrMordred wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 08:02:30 UTC, JN wrote:
>> more behind the scenes, around the same level of popularity as 
>> Nim, Crystal.
>
> Since i think this is a talk about popularity...
>
> I feel that Nim and Crystal have WAY more adoption/popularity 
> than D, but im not sure if both are backed by any great group 
> (like Rust).
>
> So I think a good point to focus this discussion is, why Nim 
> and Crystal got the lead in popularity but not D?

Crystal and Nim also have C interop and afaik support Android and 
iOS (correct me if I'm wrong) and JS. C interop was one of the 
features that turned me onto D.

https://crystal-lang.org/reference/overview/

https://nim-lang.org/docs/backends.html

Mind you, the first thing a lot of people ask is "Can I use it on 
mobile and is it painless to do so?". This is the reality of 
things. Kotlin devs realized that. Language adoption is not 
_only_ about language features, it's about usefulness too. This 
is why they simplified Scala.

I don't know about Crystal and Nim (they're still very young), 
but Kotlin, for example, ships with certain guarantees that give 
you security. Updates usually bring new and useful features that 
are not random and don't break existing code. I know, some people 
may be tempted to say "Ah, that's a language for mediocre coders, 
real wizards use D, those who read their books in binary format!" 
But what good is a language you cannot really use as a "general 
purpose" language, and general purpose includes multiple 
platforms.