D programming language popularity

[Araq]

On Sunday, 8 November 2020 at 17:00:07 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> This is something not many languages has thought of which is 
> generic pointer types, the ability to mix pointer types in a 
> program that are not pre-determined. C++ has its unique_ptr and 
> shared_ptr but I was think more in line with A_ptr or B_ptr and 
> what those pointers are supposed to use is configurable. This 
> is of course possible as library additions but I've never seen 
> languages to offer this out of the box and it would be nice to 
> have a language framework for this. Nim offers to replace its 
> "ref" types with any type of GC. However, why not go a step 
> further and allow several types of "ref" types.

Nim does go this step further and allows for custom pointer 
types. Not that good of an idea, interop between libraries 
doesn't improve when they cannot even agree on the used pointer 
type, but it is supported in Nim.