You should probably say you are the core contributor to D!

We are fortunate in having a number of highly competent core D contributors!

What I meant is that it is proper etiquette to disclose that you are the creator of D.

It's been so long that I assume everybody recognize his name hehe

Why D sees low adoption?

I think in many ways D was just too ahead of it's time; Packaging the same feature set and abstraction level of C++ in much cleaner and saner package wasn't really seen at valuable at that time. I think that if D were to be "re-release today" with a lighter syntax, and some coporate backing a-la GO/swift/typescript/carbon; It would find quite a bit of success.

We could do a better job at marketing

I really like D and want to use D instead of Zig if I can...

But it's difficult to do so! Nothing to do with marketing in my case, at least. The reasons are :

* `dub` is badly documented and does dumb things like including test code in the generated binary.

* `serve-d` is terrible. It can't handle even my little hello world programs - either crashes or consumes 100% CPU until I manually kill it.

* MacOS support sucks. All the time I have problems: the linker didn't work for years (fixed now). Immediate segmentation faults currently (fixed in nightly AFAIK). C code using the new flat128 doesn't compile (I think it was fixed already?). Just constant frustration.

* Too many features, many broken. It has an experimental borrow-checking feature, I tried to use it but it's largely undocumented. People in the Forum told me to that feature is completely unfinished. It has an allocators package as well, but no idea how I can make use of those like I would in Zig. Would love to see a well written post about that.

Using D in betterC mode is what I am most interested about exactly because it looks more like Zig and C than Java - and performs much better. But currently, that means forgetting about Phobos, the standard library, as that's written exclusively with GC and Exceptions in mind. Maybe that's ok as you can just use all C libraries you want, but would be nice to have some D conveniences to make that worthwhile.

Apart from that, I completely agree that D's comptime and metaprogramming is the best I've seen in any language (except for Lisp of course). All I need to keep using D is much better tooling and clarification about what parts of the language are "half-baked" (especially around DIP1000) and which parts are stable - perhaps "editions" will give us that, will check it out when it's ready. Oh and also top-notch MacOS support... I know that's a moving target but even Zig manages to handle that just fine, why not D?!

Build the “killer app” that the audience wants and needs and where D is the best lang to do it and justify the investment in learning yet another lang. I have no idea of what that is and nobody knows, it’s the universal problem of any product/lang/tech. Right place at the right time I guess

A killer app can be built in any language.

Of course it can, but different killer apps for a different crowd. A missile tracking system wouldn't be the kind of application to do in PHP. Wrong app, wrong crowd.

I'm aware of D since it's inception more or less but don't know it very well. I would say D lacks a "bombastic" feature and maybe that's both the reason is not used more but also why is such a good language.

It's not "memory safe" like Rust, yes it's fast but so is C/C++, it doesn't have the "massive parallelism/ always-on" robustness like Erlang. It has a bit of everything which is good and bad.

Being a mid all-arounder is OK in my book, perhaps it's more a matter of some "post-AI" tech startup adopt it and get massive or famous, like Ruby because of the Web 2.0 era or Erlang with the Whatsapp thing.

Maybe D is good the way it is and will always be there.

D doesn't have a bombastic or killer feature. What it has is elegance. It simplifies things, and smooths out the ugly stuff. You don't have to worry if your char is signed or unsigned, or how many bits are in an int, or whether to use dot or arrow, or remember to make your destructor virtual, and on and on.

It's a more memory safe language than C/C++, no need to worry about forward references, strong encapsulation, simple modules, and so on.

And let's face it - the C preprocessor is an abomination in modern languages, why does it persist?

Good question, but I don't think this is the place for that conversation :) And I say that as a Dlang fan :)

Why would a comment suggesting to use D not be the place to have a conversation for why D doesn't see adoption?

You and Walter could do that, but this post is about some cool devs and their cool Zig project.

In part, the compiler wasn't fully FOSS until 2017.

The gdc and ldc compilers were fully FOSS around 2007.

We were able to get dmd's backend license fixed in 2017.

Ah, I stand corrected!

too many features. tryhard vibe

We're implementing "editions" in order to remove some features that don't deliver enough value.

how is the community going these days ? stable ? growing ?

D does a pretty good job translating function-like macros, including creating lambdas out of macro expressions like:

    #define X 3+y

I haven't experimented with translate-c to see just what it does, I am going by the description of it which is a bit vague.

ImportC can also import D modules, so C code can access the D code.