Thoughts from newcommer

[Piotr Kowalski via Digitalmars-d]

Hello D community,

I am language polyglot that lately got interested in D. I love 
it, it's very elegant language, so simple and so powerful same 
time. I will write some thoughts as outsider.

The reason I am looking at D in 2017 is that D it's almost 
nonexistent on popular sites for programmers (reddit/HN etc). The 
only discussion I remember about D was that it had two standard 
libraries and there were no consensus on which to use and that it 
uses GC so it's slow.

In my opinion D can get traction but it needs a lot more 
marketing and people need to be more vocal about blog posts 
written about D usage. If you don't have account on Reddit or 
HackerNews, create one, upvote articles about D, answer questions 
about D in comments, promote D (without zealotry).

Two other important things to change people minds about D 
performance:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

Why D is not there?

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/previews/round14/#section=data-r14&hw=ph&test=plaintext

This is another very popular benchmark that people discuss and 
can attract new people to look at D. vibe.d here is not working, 
it would be good to fix that.

What is the plan for D for next 5 years? What about RAII?

Did you consider implementing solutions from which we could get 
memory safety without GC in D? Static analysis combined with some 
additional annotations/rules (but not intrusive).
For example using some of the solutions from Cyclone[1] or Rust 
or proposed solutions for lifetimes in C++[2]

[1] 
http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/cyclone/papers/cyclone-safety.pdf

[2] 
https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/docs/Lifetimes%20I%20and%20II%20-%20v0.9.1.pdf