Why is D unpopular?

[bachmeier]

On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 23:33:05 UTC, arco wrote:

> But at what point did D become truly usable using open source 
> compilers? GDC was only declared feature complete, supported 
> and merged upstream in GCC 9.0, that is in 2019. Both Go and 
> Rust came with open source, production quality, reference 
> compilers since day 1. It really makes a difference.

How are you defining "day 1"? I stopped using Rust before version 
1, and I can guarantee that there was nothing production quality 
about their compiler. Unless you mean by "day 1" the day version 
1 was released - which was four years after the first release". 
When I checked Wikipedia to see these dates, I found this 
interesting quote

> In January 2014, before the first stable release, Rust 1.0, the 
> editor-in-chief of Dr. Dobb's, Andrew Binstock, commented on 
> Rust's chances of becoming a competitor to C++ and to the other 
> up-and-coming languages D, Go, and Nim (then Nimrod). According 
> to Binstock, while Rust was "widely viewed as a remarkably 
> elegant language", adoption slowed because it repeatedly 
> changed between versions.