What do you think would be the key factors to drive mass adoption of D?

[Doigt]

On Thursday, 22 January 2026 at 00:57:04 UTC, MacAsm wrote:
> A few ideas that come to mind:
>
That ship has sailed long ago. D is condemned to be a niche hobby 
language, but please do go on...

> -   A truly ****batteries-included IDE**** (something on the 
> level of Visual Studio for C# or IntelliJ for Java) — would 
> that make a big difference? Right now the experience is mostly 
> VS Code + code-d + serve-d, which is decent but still feels 
> fragmented compared to mainstream languages.
>
There are only 2 ways this can be done:
1. Find someone who can do it and pay them full time forever.
2. Do it yourself full time forever.

There's a reason SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop and many other such 
IDEs died. They couldn't catch up to the corporations. They were 
always behind and eventually they burned out. A D ide will never 
catch up to D itself, nevermind all the other languages out there.

> -   For corporate/enterprise environments in particular: do you 
> think a modern ****GUI designer**** (visual drag-and-drop) 
> would help a lot? Many teams still build desktop/business apps 
> and love tools like WinForms Designer, WPF/XAML preview, or Qt 
> Designer.
>
For that, you'd need a good GUI lib first and it needs to work 
well on Windows. Then once you have that, see my reply above 
about the IDE thing.

> -   Alternatively — maybe a ****declarative UI language**** 
> with live preview (something XAML-like, or even better: 
> immediate hot-reload / live-reloading of UI + logic) would be 
> more powerful and future-proof than a classic designer?
>
Other things I wanted for Christmas were a ¢20 canadian coin, 
rock from mars, DDR5 memory sticks for cheap and peace in the 
world, but Santa skipped my chimney again.

> Beyond tooling:
>
> -   Strong ****corporate backing**** (big companies using + 
> sponsoring it)
>
Actually that's the one thing we have.

> -   Way more high-quality ****tutorials****, beginner-friendly 
> learning paths, and real-world project examples
>
Making tutorials is basically a full time job. Do you know how 
time consuming that is? I tried to do it once. Even a small 
nothing can take hours to script, shoot and edit. Even just 
textual tutorials; you still need to write it (and it's harder to 
explain something in text only), find or make good pictures, etc. 
and way less people read nowadays.

> -   Active ****evangelists****, conference talks, YouTube 
> content, and community momentum
>
Evangelism is overrated. I know from first hand experience. I 
used to be a D evangelist. The people I managed to attract to D 
didn't stay. I first learned about D in 2021. I started talking 
about D on campuses and showcasing it to students and professors 
I know in 2022 (+ some people in various programming discord 
groups). I did it until last year in 2025. So about 3 years of 
evangelism. In that time, I estimate to have "recruited" about 25 
ish people. Of those, most didn't stick with D. I know only a 
single person who stuck with it. Evangelism is very inefficient.

> What else do you see as important missing pieces?
>
Docs in the 10 most spoken languages in the world would help a 
lot. One of the challenges I faced when trying to get people into 
D was the lack of learning material in French, which is the 
native language of the people in Quebec, where I'm from (and QC 
is very bilingual, so if that's an issue here, I can't imagine 
about more unilingual places).