> To get access to a wealth of libraries, support, documentation and tools, that D is sorely lacking in.
Libraries have never been an issue for me. You get all C libraries trivially, so to the extent that C has libraries, so does D. I also embed R inside my D programs, so I get access to every R library. And if you want to object that "R is slow", I'm not talking about only calling R, I'm also talking about calling R bindings to C++ libraries without having to involve R. I suppose there would be some marginal benefits to having everything written in D, but many people seem more than happy to use languages like Python that access functions written in other languages.
> And most importantly, to be able to use a platform that has pretty strong guarantees about backwards compatibility and that is able to run code from 10 years ago without modification, as opposed to D where even a minor version update can end up breaking D's own standard library.
Breaking changes are not that frequent. You're right, though, if you have a zero-tolerance policy with respect to breaking changes, you can't use D or any other language that has breaking changes.
> it was released as a proprietary compiler that ended up quickly resulting a very fragmented community with a lot of infighting, many missteps and mismanagement made on the part of D's leadership the result of which is that D lost on the order of 5-10 years worth of progress for nothing.
You're referring to things that happened before the pyramids of Egypt were built. Why would someone that has no interest in the language spend time writing comments about ancient, ancient history on Hacker News?
Libraries have never been an issue for me. You get all C libraries trivially, so to the extent that C has libraries, so does D. I also embed R inside my D programs, so I get access to every R library. And if you want to object that "R is slow", I'm not talking about only calling R, I'm also talking about calling R bindings to C++ libraries without having to involve R. I suppose there would be some marginal benefits to having everything written in D, but many people seem more than happy to use languages like Python that access functions written in other languages.
> And most importantly, to be able to use a platform that has pretty strong guarantees about backwards compatibility and that is able to run code from 10 years ago without modification, as opposed to D where even a minor version update can end up breaking D's own standard library.
Breaking changes are not that frequent. You're right, though, if you have a zero-tolerance policy with respect to breaking changes, you can't use D or any other language that has breaking changes.
> it was released as a proprietary compiler that ended up quickly resulting a very fragmented community with a lot of infighting, many missteps and mismanagement made on the part of D's leadership the result of which is that D lost on the order of 5-10 years worth of progress for nothing.
You're referring to things that happened before the pyramids of Egypt were built. Why would someone that has no interest in the language spend time writing comments about ancient, ancient history on Hacker News?