C++11 borrowed a few good ideas from D and other languages so that certainly helped close the gap between D and C++ but D is still significantly nicer to work in than C++ (which is what I spend all day at work writing).

You can use RAII all you want in D. The D standard library uses it for things like Files, containers, and smart pointers. I feel like Garbage Collectors have become something of a bogeyman for native languages. There is a lot of value a garbage collector can add. In D it's rarely hard to switch to managing your own memory if your profiler shows the garbage collector taking up more time than you'd like. For most programs avoiding the garbage collector is a premature optimization though.

For IDEs you have: - Mono-D http://mono-d.alexanderbothe.com/ - VisualD (should be included with Windows DMD in the next release) https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/visuald - Code completion for a variety of editors including vim, emacs, SublimeText2 , Textadept, and zeus. DCD https://github.com/Hackerpilot/DCD