[WalterBright]

Two have told me they did so because D enabled them to write faster code than their competitors, and they were in a line of business where faster code meant making more money.

One reason D code is faster is array slicing, where you can refer to a subsection of an array. This pays off for things like strings. Consider the string:

    s = "/root/me/file.ext";

I want to extract the "file" as a string. In C/C++, because strings are 0-terminated, I have a cache hit, allocate 5 bytes and copy 5 characters and install a 0. In D,

     name = s[9 .. 13];

I have no cache hit, add 9 to a pointer, copy 5 to the length.

(A slice is equivalent to a (length, pointer) pair.)