Quora: Why hasn't D started to replace C++?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 31 January 2018 at 19:00:57 UTC, Jack Stouffer 
wrote:
> That's just something that Walter was able to bang out in an 
> hour, should have been done years ago, and was excited about.

So it isn't a big deal, but IMO that should be left to an IDE or 
shell.

Back to the argument about cPython vs PyPy/dmd vs ldc. You want 
the reference compiler to be relatively simple and leave the 
unnecessary complications to the production compiler. So if DMD's 
backend was simple and only was a bare minimum implementation of 
the semantics then having multiple compilers would be comparable 
to the Python situation. PyPy is probably way too complicated to 
act as a reference and it would be difficult for Python to move 
if it had been the reference.

Some might say that DMD is too complicated to act as a reference 
as well, and that D has a problem moving because of it. If that 
is true, and I think it is, then the logical conclusion would be 
to make the DMD codebase simpler and leave performance to LDC. 
Like Python does with PyPy.