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

[IGotD-]

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:24:32 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

> "D is failing" has the attribute of a meme, if the number of 
> users are great, funding solify, more compilers and platform 
> support exist than ever before (without any seasonal hype) then 
> there is no real reason to worry about the competition.

This thread is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. For those who 
think D has failed, I suggest you just sit and wait until it 
fails.

Just for comparison, a compiler that has failed (not the 
language) is OpenWatcom. Last update was in 2010. It is dead 
simply because there aren't any contributors and the reason is 
that GCC and Clang is doing a better job. Watcom was a good 
compiler back in its days though.

This is a list of "system programming languages" from Wikipedia.

ESPOL
PL/I
PL360
C
PL/S
BLISS
PL/8
PL-6
SYMPL
C++
Ada
D
Nim
Go
Rust
Swift

Apart from C/C++, which "system programming languages" has 
succeeded here?
ESPOL, PL/I, PL360, PL/S, BLISS, PL/8, PL-6, SYMPL are old and 
was more used when computers smelled brunt.
Ada is kind of successful but used more in military, avionics and 
other critical SW. Very little used outside this domain though, 
which is strange as it is supposed to be a safe language which is 
seems to be the fad of today.
Nim, following is even smaller than D. Good language but rough 
around the edges and not as consistent as it should be.
Rust, is that "modern" runner up and heavily promoted, the 
language that is safe and is going to solve everything. I 
disagree, I think it will not pick up because as soon you try to 
do something more outside the box you will hit a brick wall.
Swift and Go, in my opinion don't belong here as my 
interpretation of a "system programming language" is that it 
shouldn't be dependent on a runtime. D is kind of in this 
category as well but recent betterC development moved it into the 
system programming language category.
There are probably more but these are little used that we don't 
need to mention them here.

When it comes to other programming languages used for 
applications then competitions really stiffens up. In this league 
we have Python which is undoubtedly the current king among other 
like C#, Java, Ruby on so on. If look at Python, the success is 
really because it is so simple, intuitive, easy to find 
information, massive library support, the complete opposite of 
Rust why I think it is a dead end.

It is clear that C/C++ has a massive code base and users, that's 
why these languages are on top and no other language seem to even 
approach their usage. Many companies are hugely invested in C/C++ 
and that's why they must continue. That in mind it is absolute 
killer feature of D to have a C/C++ FFI that many other languages 
don't have. Nim, has some of this. Rust goes nuts if you talk to 
any other language. How many know that you can mix D with C++?

If you look at the other languages (except C/C++) do you still 
think D has failed? I certainly don't think so, it is right there 
among the competitors.

Some talk about the failure of the management of D, that might be 
so however I don't think it is too late to improve this.