What are the prominent downsides of the D programming language?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Monday, 21 September 2020 at 09:29:21 UTC, Tomcruisesmart 
wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm looking for healthy conversation.
> What are the prominent downsides of the D programming language?

First of all let me say that the community is great, so this is 
probably what I would state on the upsides thread.

On the downsides, getting a clear roadmap actually done, instead 
of falling to the fallacy of paying to much attention what other 
languages are doing.

Also stating that D did it first hardly helps adoption.

Yes there are plenty of language features that D did it first, 
but now 10 years later since I bought Andrei's book, I have most 
of those features available in C# 9, Java 15, C++20, alongside 
the richness of their tooling, libraries and eco-systems.

And what is still missing from them, happens to be on their 
roadmaps anyway.

Also while everyone keeps arguing about the sense of having a GC 
or not in a systems language, and in what form, we have languages 
like Java managing TB heaps with 1ms pauses, and on Android it is 
even possible to write drivers with their Java flavour if one so 
wishes (post Treble).

While other companies ship devices running bare metal Go, .NET 
Core and had Unity chosen something like D, they wouldn't be 
doing Burst compiler nowadays and contributing back some of it 
into .NET tooling.

They managed to achieve this by just keep going at it regardless 
of the opposition against it.

So this is the biggest downside, not having one main pillar to 
which to create a strong statement of direction where others can 
gather around, while at the same time stabilizing the features 
that are still half-way there.