Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Friday, 5 November 2021 at 16:02:45 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> 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

Rust had a very erudite hardcore following from the start. Some 
people would argue about their proofs for various formulation of 
aspects of the type system in coq. Lots of showoff in the 
commentary… So they attracted people with compi.sci. background 
(and possibly students). In that sense they did not need to be 
productive from the start, they had fun with the type system etc.

I don't think this has been the case for D, but you could argue 
that those that created Tango also had fun with ideas (albeit in 
a less erudite manner).

I also don't think open source mattered much in the case of Go, 
like most Google products they are primarily developed by Google 
employees and these products tend to die/stagnate when Google 
stops development.