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

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 19 November 2019 at 17:23:46 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> There's a bit of a sample selection issue. Anyone open to GC 
> moved to Java long ago. These days anyone still using C++ 
> either has a good reason to fear the GC (certain real-time 
> applications) or an irrational fear of the GC.

It is not a question of fearing GC, but global collection is a 
rather blunt tool (compared to a scan-limited single-threaded 
collector, data-structure-local-collector or good ol' 
refcounting). Also, GC use twice as much memory or more, than 
carefully planned memory management.

> The D of today would have had great success at recruiting C++ 
> programmers 20 years ago, but by about 2005 or so, Java had 
> already sucked up all the potential converts.

I doubt Java had much effect on C++ programmers that gave D a 
shot, some C++ to D converts was absorbed back to C++ from D by 
C++11/C++14,  and Go and Rust absorbed some others...

Anyway, these days the picture is much more complex. Like how 
Kotlin is also aiming for the native compilation game with a LLVM 
backend... so with Kotlin being the default language on Android 
and Swift trying to become a thing on servers... well, that could 
skew things quite a bit for C++ programmers looking for managed 
languages.