Why do C++ programmers are not interested in D?

[Mark]

On Tuesday, 19 November 2019 at 08:51:49 UTC, Pavel Shkadzko 
wrote:
> Sorry for "clickbaity" title but I believe it is discussion 
> inducing.
>
> This spring I started looking into D and trying it for some of 
> the data analysis and scripting tasks. So, I am fairly new to 
> the language and all its toolset (mainly using Python and Scala 
> at work). I don't know C++. We do however have C++ engineers so 
> I asked them around. I was quite surprised that none of them 
> knew or even tried to use D. They of course heard about the 
> language but that's it.
>
> This Friday I also attended a PyTorch meetup in Munich at 
> Microsoft where one of the core PyTorch developers (Adam 
> Paszke) made a presentation about the future of this deep 
> learning library. During presentation he mentioned that he 
> played around with Hasktorch (a PyTorch inspired library in 
> Haskell) to see how does PyTorch concepts go with functional 
> style. When I approached him after the talk and asked if he 
> ever thought of trying D for that purpose he looked surprised 
> and confessed that he didn't know the language, heard about it 
> yes but it never occurred to him to try and use it.
>
> Having read about how D is a better C++ and trying it out, I 
> have a feeling that it would be extremely easy for C++ devs to 
> just start programming in it minutes away after getting to know 
> its syntax. I saw it with my own eyes in one of the Munich 
> meetups on D. But why are so few C++ devs actually do it 
> remains a mystery to me. I would really like to stay away from 
> the general discussion on why D is not as popular as other 
> languages :) rather I'd ask around for C++ programmers who have 
> tried D and share some positive experience they had so that I 
> could spread the word.

In addition to what others have written, here's another thing to 
consider: D's "killer feature" is its metaprogramming 
capabilities, but I don't think most C++ programmers, rightly or 
wrongly, care that much about metaprogramming. I think the reason 
Rust hasn't replaced C++ (so far, anyway) is similar - it's 
killer feature is "memory safety by default" but most C++ 
programmers that I know don't consider (lack of) memory safety to 
be a major problem in the language.