I looked into D once or twice. Found learning materials severely lacking. Having to read up on the differences between 2 (3?) compilers and choose between them wasn’t a great intro.

For the work I do GC is also a non-starter. I know it’s got some level of no-gc now but the last time I looked it wasn’t well-supported.

In short it seemed interesting but on-boarding felt hard. And with that the value proposition wasn’t there or well-advertised: It’s supposedly “better” in some ways such as faster compile times and better meta-programming and frankly that didn’t seem worth the effort.

Rust by contrast does an excellent job of onboarding and making it easy to learn the language (at least at an introductory level). It also comes with a very straightforward value proposition: just as fast as c++ but whole classes of bugs simply aren’t possible. Add in a little bit of ergonomics and functional flavour and I was hooked.

I love D's community and what they were trying to achieve, but it appears that the language has lost its opportunity to adoption or sense of direction.

What I liked on it over Java and .NET languages, is no longer relevant after GraalVM, and the low level features in C# 7/8 adopted from Midori, came to be.

Also C++20 now makes much D less relevant.

Unfortunately the recent @safe and @live discussions don't inspire confidence in which direction they want to drive the language design.