What are the prominent upsides of the D programming language?

[Imperatorn]

On Tuesday, 22 September 2020 at 20:45:32 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> 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.

Nice summary. I also "tried" Rust. It was just such a pain. I 
wish it wasn't, but it was. Go was nice, I got productive quite 
fast. But yeah, it feels like a toy language and I can't express 
more advanced concepts without abusing the multiverse. Julia is 
really nice, but deployment is almost impossible. A single 
executable could very well be like 100MB... Sure, things might 
have improved since then, but we have D so why bother? :)

I honestly feel we should try and improve D as much as possible. 
If we get some things right and can prove it's stable and 
scalable for production I really think D could be one of those 
languages people would turn to (instead of trying to convince 
them to use it)

So, let's fix as many issues as possible and make the future of D 
bright (no pun intended).