Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 2 November 2021 at 19:10:08 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> Someone wanting to replace C for things that need to be much 
> faster than a scripting language have Rust, Go, Nim, and 
> others. The fact that some of those languages are good for 
> compiling to Javascript is yet another reason to not use D.

Not so sure about Javascript, but for people looking for a niche 
programming language there certainly are many options.

Although I feel the primary reason is that D is without 
direction. The original focus was to be a cleaned up C++, without 
the complicating bits, but D2 gave it roughly the same 
disadvantages that C++ has without the advantages C++ has. That 
in combination with some odd choices (on multiple levels) for 
system level programming sends a signal of no clear vision.

I think it is very important for small niche languages to send a 
very strong and clear signal of what the vision is, like Rust 
did. Because people don't pick them up for what they are capable 
of today, but for where they are heading. They want to join the 
ride, be one of the early adopters, gold rush, innovators, etc. 
That's how you get hyped up…

The current vision appears to be to entertain those that find the 
current feature set attractive, but that is a very foggy picture. 
It is very difficult for outsiders to figure out where D is 
headed from such an unclear vision.