Why did D leave the programming language shootout and will it return?

[Peter Alexander]

On 21/09/11 12:58 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 09/21/2011 01:37 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> (In contrast, C++ must invoke the copy constructor.)
>
> C++11 rvalue references manage to make that effect somewhat less painful
> though.

Less expensive computationally, yes, but the cost to the programmer is huge.

I'm willing to bet that the % of professional C++ programmers that could 
write (for example) std::vector, using move and copy semantics 
correctly, with all the correctness and exception safety guarantees, is 
incredibly low -- probably less than 1%.

In D, you just memcpy most of the time. It makes things so much easier.

And what do you lose? Internal pointers?

Who cares about internal pointers? They are so rarely used and easily 
replaceable that the overwhelming cost of supporting them is completely 
unjustified.

The disallowing of internal pointers is easily my #1 favourite feature of D.