What are the prominent upsides of the D programming language?

[bachmeier]

On Monday, 21 September 2020 at 11:04:43 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
> Top reasons to use D instead of for example Rust, Julia, Go etc 
> :)

My biggest use is compatibility with C. Not necessarily only C, 
but if another language has an FFI, you need compatibility with 
C. When I started using D, it was the best option.

I tried Rust and Go before D. Rust was weird and had a learning 
curve that was irrelevant for my purposes and guaranteed nobody 
I'd ever work with would ever use it. I would have been ashamed 
to even ask. I tried Go, but I don't need someone else to tell me 
how to program. I also spent a little time evaluating Julia, but 
by the time it was ready for production I had no reason to use 
it. There's nothing in particular wrong with Julia. It's just 
that there's nothing special about it either relative to D.

The main points that stood out to me about D were the garbage 
collector (critical), compatibility with C, ability to easily 
create a reference counted type when I needed it, and the fact 
that it "makes sense", being a good alternative to scripting 
languages. Unlike some languages, it's easy to work with a small 
subset of the language. For instance, I rarely use templates, and 
that doesn't cause any trouble. It also doesn't hurt that I 
subjectively like it better than other languages.