D programming language popularity

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On Sunday, 8 November 2020 at 09:28:05 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> Language semantics stops it. D cannot do precise GC with the 
> current semantics, you need to locate all actual pointers, 
> including those in unions. The default is essentially a boehm 
> collector and the other one is semi-conservative, not precise...

If I understand it right you also can't have a GC with heap 
compaction in D, because this would invalidate pointers. Most 
high performance GCs use heap compaction...

The language relies on GC (you can't use all features without 
it), but at the same time it is designed in a way you can't have 
a competitive GC (compared to JVM/CLR).