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.
Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release?
No judgement against trying to monetize valuable work, but in this day and nearly everyone expects free and OSS compilers/interpreters and core tooling.
> Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release?
The backend for the DMD compiler was not fully open source for a number of years. That's because Symantec owned some of the code and they were not willing to let it be relicensed. They did allow that in 2017. It was never a paid product AFAIK.
Overall, that was beneficial to the D community. The GDC backend has always been open, and for some time has been part of GCC. The LDC backend was developed to use LLVM. It's possible that there would not have been motivation for those projects if DMD's backend had been open from the start. DMD compiles fast but the performance is not competitive with the other compilers if you're working on something that needs to push the CPU to its limits.
