What are the prominent upsides of the D programming language?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Wednesday, 23 September 2020 at 04:04:04 UTC, mw 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 :)
>
> [...]
>
> I think this flexibility to mix GC & manual memory management 
> is very unique in D. Actually I'm not sure if it can be done in 
> other languages at all.

Before Java and .NET took over the computing world, we had 
Mesa/Cedar, Modula-2+, Modula-3, Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, 
Active Oberon, Component, Pascal, Zonnon, Common Lisp/Interlisp, 
Eiffel.

Actually F#/C#/VB could do it since ever, because CLR/MSIL is 
rich enough to support C++ as well. Initially via Managed C++, 
later replaced by C++/CLI.

Recent F#/C#/VB versions expose more of those capabilities as 
intrisics at language level.

On MSR labs there was Sing# and System C#.

As of lately we get Swift, Go and Nim.

When Valhala/Panama finally get done, Java as well (Java 15 just 
got the first drop of this work).

While it is a very good feature and I appreciate D took down this 
path, the competition is getting hard, as mainstream language 
designers finally got that GC without escape hatches doesn't 
really cut it, and those 80 and 90's languages had a point 
offering all those features alongside each other.

And now with Rust making the rounds, everyone is trying to find a 
way to integrate some form of affine types with a GC, as a 
compromise between productivity and performance while not going 
crazy with lifetime annotations.

So it is nice to see D among those languages.