Thankfully, GC offers productivity and allows for safe code by default, while D still offers the necessary language features to do all the low level tricks from C, C++, Rust, Objective-C, if one actually needs to go down that level.

I like being able to write safe and GC-free code by default. Rust would be even better if it was possible to opt into GC, but I would still want to to be GC-free by default. It's good that the entire library ecosystem has grown up GC-free and that should continue.

If I hadn’t already embraced C# for that sort of thing, I’d probably have turned to D years ago. Between C# and Rust, I rarely find myself needing other tools aside from Makefiles and shell scripts.