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

[Julian Fondren]

On Wednesday, 28 January 2026 at 20:12:33 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> My guess is it's more of a marketing/networking than a 
> technical issue.

In the long run it's all language design, because language design 
is what appeals to people who provide the marketing and technical 
fixes. Python overtaking Perl at a time when it was grossly 
inferior in *every* way except for design is a good case of this. 
Language design also decides if some high-level goal ("fast 
compilation", "good editor support") is an easy or a hard 
technical challenge. For example,

> As I understand it, all non-mainstream languages are a bit 
> unpolished, have relatively few tutorials, relatively little 
> support in IDE tooling and so on compared to the biggest 
> mainstream languages.

OCaml has had 3000 AD editor support since before LSPs, even 
better than Kotlin which comes from an IDE company and had a good 
IDE experience as a highlighted design constraint.

For another language, the editor support is a frequent source of 
complaints: it crashes, it bugs out, it tries to use all memory. 
Well, this other language also has often-used Common Lisp-tier 
macros, CTFE, implicit imports, complex overloading rules, and 
subtle syntax.

OCaml has very fast separate compilation while some languages 
today have been on a decade-long quest to somewhat improve 
compile speeds. There are design reasons for that too. It isn't 
only that Rust was lacking in corporate interest in making it 
compile faster.

With D, you can paste in some C code and know that you'll either 
get C's behavior or a clear error. This prevents D from having 
Zig's certainty that weird integer promotion rules aren't 
screwing with some code. (It also wards somewhat against Zig's 
verbosity.) I can see the appeal of this for migrating from C or 
for using some C hacker delight code in D - but not anymore. AI 
hype is very tiresome but it's too good at this in particular. 
Try it:

1. https://docs.ollama.com/linux#manual-install
2. ollama pull qwen3-coder
3. ( echo "translate this to D:"; cat somefile.c ) | ollama run 
qwen3-coder

> I'm a fan of another relatively new technology that is yet to 
> become mainstream: the [Nix package manager](https://nixos.org).

Take a look at the latest thread in the LDC forum. I tried using 
Nix for cross-compilation and it impressed me even if it didn't 
work out for me.

Nix is also an interesting example of opt-in epochs.