D programming language popularity

[random]

On Thursday, 5 November 2020 at 06:58:31 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Just one example among others that I can point out for PTC and 
> Aicas, which despite being JVMs, also support bare metal 
> deployments for this kind of targets, thus as native as 
> anything else that AOT compiles to native code with a language 
> runtime.

Ok, there are ways to AOT JVM languages. My point was, if you can 
afford to use JVM you have nice alternatives to D. Also D's GC 
will by design never be as powerful as JVM GC. In D you can have 
pointers to manual memory, etc. This restricts the GC.

> Then there are these products:
>
> Astrobe selling Oberon devkits for ARM, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, 
> Cortex-M7 and now RISC-V, in business for about 20 years.

I never even heard of someone programming in Oberon.

> https://www.astrobe.com/Oberon.htm
>
> F-Secure using their own Go port for secure firmware, among 
> them their own computer on an USB key, USB Armory
>
> https://www.f-secure.com/en/consulting/foundry/usb-armory
>
> So there is a market, even if you personally don't care about 
> it.

This is a imputation. I never said I don't care. All the things 
you mentioned are really niche. Because you somehow misunderstood 
my argument i will simplify it for you:
- When you can live with GC you can most of the time live with 
JVM or CLR. Then you have a lot good languages to choose from.
- If you can't live with JVM/CLR then you either have a very 
resource limited system or you really need every bit of 
performance. In this case you want a native language without GC.

Most of the time native language and GC is not the right 
combination.