Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Friday, 5 November 2021 at 13:10:58 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> Interesting point of view because obviously it isn't the point 
> of view of many in the D community. I'll spare you the details 
> but it is very possible D outperform those in their specialty.

I think we need to embrace the idea that there is no single 
factor, and that D cannot best languages with critical mass in 
their speciality niches.

One does not have to like Go as a language to understand that Go 
objectively has a runtime and ecosystem that makes it more 
suitable for micro services than D; Go is better supported (by 
cloud providers and by library authors). For instance, last time 
I tested I could automatically boot OS+service on a new machine 
as a Go instance in one second on App Engine Standard, and a Java 
server in 4 seconds. Although I could set up D, I would not be 
able to get close to those numbers, it would not be automatic and 
it would cost more. Clearly Go wins (unless Python is suitable, 
in which case Python wins).

Rust clearly is more suitable than D if you want WASM (C++ might 
be even better, I don't know).

Python is objectively the better portable scripting language, 
because D isn't a scripting language. Python has vast libraries 
and interop you get access to, there is no way D can reach 
critical mass there.

Of course, there is no reason for D to go after microservices, 
scripting or WASM either!! If D had an application framework, 
then it would be better than Go/Rust/Python for writing desktop 
apps, for instance.