Article calls D "irrelevant"

[Paulo Pinto]

On Wednesday, 25 February 2026 at 02:27:35 UTC, Meta wrote:
> https://www.makeuseof.com/why-is-c-programming-language-called-c-what-happened-to-d/
>
> "But, despite its achievement, D faced a classic problem. By 
> the time D arrived, the world had already moved on. Enterprise 
> companies were using Java and C#, and the world was still 
> firmly locked into C and C++. A few years later, a language 
> called Rust appeared which focused heavily on memory safety 
> (the same principle as D), and it managed to capture the 
> attention of the tech world in a way that D never quite managed 
> — and effectively made D irrelevant.
>
> Today, D exists as a highly respected niche language. It's 
> actually used by companies like Netflix and eBay for specific 
> high-performance tasks. It's a great language, but it never 
> became a king."

As someone that still has a special place for D, and promotes it 
when opportunity comes up.

In 2026, the world of programming languages isn't the same as 
when Andrei Alexandrescu published his on D, back in 2010.

Many of the features that D had, are now available in various 
flavours in Java, C#, F#, C++,  Swift doesn't matter if they are 
clunky or half way there versus what D has, they have the IDEs, 
libraries and frameworks to make up for it, and company overlords 
to push them no matter what.

D could have had the place C# enjoys among game developers, after 
Remedy made use of it.

Then we have Rust, Go, Zig, Odin, C3, and whatever else is new on 
HN, as new contenders, some of them with huge enterprise support, 
including Facebook, once upon a time a D adopter.

Finally there is the whole AI programming, that to some extent 
makes the actual programming language irrelevant, where classical 
programming languages become a target for code generation out of 
human language or formal proofs.

I wish D stays around, it has quite a few cool ideas, and I am on 
the sytems languages with automatic resource management team.

However, it is what it is after all these years.