That remains to be seen. I'm doing some pretty hardcore video encoding and processing that will use and extend some existing C libraries. I was tempted to just use the FFI to call them from Ruby (which I still may end up doing), but I figured that this is a great chance to test-drive D.

Sounds like your working along the lines that I am, except I am using (gasp) c++. Are you doing H.264/263 or some custom stuff?

Interesting. My stuff is pretty niche and custom. No H.264 for me. :)

Compilation of your applications to binary for one. Also, it enables you to do the bit twiddling necessary to write device drivers and other lovely systems programming things. Maybe we'll see a better scripting language VM in D one of these days?