D deserves more recognition. It's a cool language under the radar for too long. I wish a major corporation backed it. I had a great time learning D. Also I admire Walter Bright If I could achieve even a fraction of his productivity, that would be awesome.
Programming in D after C++ is like the opposite of death by 1000 cuts - its just a constant stream of finding nice little things that simplify your life or avoid footguns. You become accustomed to all the niceties very fast and its hard to justify going back haha.
D is by no means perfect (and over the years it has accumulated lots of warts) but if you know what you are doing it enables amazing productivity and almost never gets in your way. If you have an idea about solving a problem in a particular way there's almost always a path available to do just that without running into "computer says no" situations (stares at Go).
D is technically better than C++ in most features. (It has always lead C++. For example, among about 100 new feauters that C++11 brought, only 2 were not already in D. No C++ designer will ever admit this fact.)
D is safer and more productive. It's a joy to write in D because most of the time it feels like whatever you think, you code. This is unlike C++ where you fight the language all the time. C++ is not a productive programming language. I say this with experience: I coded in C++ as an "expert" for many many years, including these last couple of years. It's not fun to write in C++, which translates to another kind of loss of productivity.
C++ is a burden and liability for companies but no CTO will be blamed for chosing it because it's popular. I can list so many popular things and persons that worth nothing but I will refrain from getting political.
Yes, on paper, there are way more C++ programmers out there than D programmers. But I interview these C++ programmers occasionally. Most of them don't even have an inkling that they don't know C++ at all.
How about engineering with C++? That is such a difficult task. I went over header file hygiene with a colleague a couple of months ago. The number of points that you should pay attention to is mind boggling: Don't #include unnecessarily, do forward declare as much as possible (but what can be forward declared is hard to understand even for experienced programmers), #include your own API header first to prove that it's complete (and good luck!), don't forget header guards, don't reuse header guards, etc. etc. This is just efficient header file usage! We haven't started coding yet!
My friends, the emperor doesn't have clothes. C++ simply is not a tool that is designed well. People who choose it do so because they have to or they are masochists. (True story: I asked a relatively young Google meetup presenter once why he was using C++ instead of a modern language and he said "because it is hard".) C++ separates the elite from the masses; I used to strive to be a C++ elite; I am not interested a bit anymore; I want to write useful programs with D; and I do.
D is niche only because humans are populists. We are not encouraged to use tools (or products) that are designed better. We follow popular leaders. It takes one some time to find his or her own voice to reject bad products and use only good ones. I am extremely lucky to work for a company that allows me to use D to write useful products.
I still take the same joy from programming that I did when I first learned it.
Then there is the human aspect of it: I want to be associated with real people isntead of snobby elites. (Remember how C++ was marketed at around 2000? "Yes, C++ is hard but it was never meant to be for normal programmers anyway." Ha ha ha! I am old enough now to reject that mentality. Bad design is bad design my friends; you can't defend it by blaming the user for not being elite.)
I can go on and on...
Now it's my turn to ask: Why would anyone choose C++ for their projects despite the production costs that it brings? None of your programmers really know it; they introduce hidden liabilities in the projects, their source code become non-refactorable monsters. Why waste that money on C++ when you can produce products easily. Products that just work...
> Why would anyone choose C++ for their projects despite the production costs that it brings?
Familiarity, and all the libraries and tools available for C++. I see that D has a section on C++ interop,[0] but it looks about as painful as FFI usually is, and even more painful given how template-heavy C++ code tends to be.
(Completely unrelated: I can't mention FFI without also mentioning how amazing LuaJIT's C FFI is. The developer(s) really nailed it.)
I actually don’t think C++98 was that bad or complex. Yes nobody knew how to use it and wrote Java instead, but I think the hate comes from having code spanning so many different features and idioms that also require a compiler expert to understand.
Sincere question, not meant to be a shallow dismissal: Where is D a better choice than C++? In what aspects is it enough of an improvement over C++ to justify using a niche language?