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

[IGotD-]

On Friday, 19 April 2019 at 14:28:26 UTC, burjui wrote:

> People here do not like to hear about Rust and often throw 
> cheap jabs at it (like, ooh, ugly syntax and lifetimes), but 
> it's a perfect example of what a language should be: a solid 
> foundation, not a mine field with candy trees. Yeah, it has 
> corporation support, but it's not the key to its success. The 
> key is principles and determination. These guys are focused, 
> concerned about language soundness and are willing to do 
> research and hard work to ensure, that the sole Rust compiler 
> is as good, as it can be practically.

I think the reason for the success of Rust if you want to call it 
that, is that it was made for something. Rust was made for a 
large project in order to reduce memory management problems and 
problems when sharing data between threads. The language had a 
purpose from the beginning. This "focus" in the Rust project is 
because there were clear goals.

I trend is clear, when you create something for a purpose you 
also get clear goals.
Rust is one example.
Git is another example, DVCS for a large kernel project.
Libre Office, create a free clone of MS office.
Ada, a safe language for mission critical applications.

Many of these are reused in other projects and domains because 
they have proven themselves to be up for the task in the project 
they were created for.

D was not created to solve something in a project (what I know 
about) but was created to give a better compiled language than 
C++. Obviously C++ wasn't bad enough. This leads to that there is 
no clear direction of D because it has no problems or questions 
to solve. This is also clear from the discussions here that there 
is no clear understanding what D is supposed to be. The 
discussion should more be "what problems should D solve", then 
you get the goals.