Those were definitely the two things that kept me from really considering it in the past. Both of those have now changed for the better and there's a more active community building up again. I think the facebook use of D has also brought some much needed attention to it to the point where the language itself is starting to accelerate changes to move forward. The DMD reference compiler still has some restrictions on the backend of it I think but because of the frontend being available there's now LDC and GDC that are LLVM and GCC versions of the compiler that do much better at optimizing and are fully open source anyway. It's also seemed to help find bugs in both the language spec and the DMD backend from what i've read on the news groups because they've got three very different implementations of the language now that are all mostly compatible (the DMD version is always a little ahead since the other two are essentially ports of it to LLVM/GCC).