Andrei is a big deal i would say
Since then FB moved on the build their own Ocaml based language reasonml
Julia doesn't have a big company behind, yet the language is steadily climbing the popularity ladder (and i doubt they have anyone at the calibre of Andrei Alexandrescu, but again, good pogrammer is not a good program manager)
D is not popular, because its leader failed at making it popular, they failed to give the qualities that would make it popular
Facebook never really adopted D beyond a C++ preprocessor written in D.
And yes the community is rather lousy with language marketing, which is completely unrelated to technical achievements.
Why are you refusing to blame the product owner
D is not a good language, it really is not, it doesn't offer any compelling advantage to justify accepting its flaw
Or simply put, its a bad product A bad product doesnt have to be trash, just enough bad design issue to make it bad I would strongly recommend new developers not to touch it there are far better option
Say it as it is, its simple, its the truth
Its functional, people use it, but its bad C++ is also bad, but its so overwhelmingly popular that you might want to learn it D is bad, and is unpopular
Not everyone is doing Websites or Android apps.
PTC isn't using Hotspot, rather their own JVM implementation.
Just like C++, Java enjoys multiple implementations.
Just like C++, the best ones for embedded deployment with soft real time capabilities, are commercial, directly supported by hardware vendors.
D's biggest failure so far is not having a Google or Apple behind it, that would push the language no matter what naysayers have to say against the language.
Just like on iOS and Android, wanna play? Here are the allowed list of toys.