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I can identify several traits that helped Rust be more marketable over D. First is that Rust is making tooling a central issue they're working on. Right now you can install VSCode and get a Rust plugin with a single click or get a VisualStudio plugin with a single click, and that gets you intellisense right away. I'm pretty sure that Rust's editor tooling has reached and surpassed D's in a comparatively tiny timeframe. Second, Rust comes with an opinionated build system and module system out of the box, while D just has a compiler, you need to figure out building yourself and use a separate package manager. This is something you would be very comfortable with if you're a C/C++ programmer, but not so if you're using pretty much any other mainstream language. These days it's expected that the language comes with a compiler, build system and package manager. Third, Rust is more novel, thus more interesting. It's a new language combining new programming paradigms in a novel way. Go has channels and goroutines, Rust has the borrow checker and zero overhead compile-time memory safety. D has... it's trying to be a better C++. It's succeeding very well, but its features aren't exciting. In conclusion, Rust has come out the gate with great marketing, with novel and interesting features not seen before in a system programming language, and with great tooling support for the current generation of developers who don't want to bother with learning arcane Makefiles (or CMakefiles as the case may be today). D is just a better C++ with the same friction to use as the language it's trying to replace, but without the top-notch tooling that exists for C++. Rust on the other hand also doesn't have tooling quite as good as C++, but it's not replacing C++ in existing projects, it's used for new projects. One case where D significantly outpaces Rust is in its ability to interface with C++. This gives it a significant edge in being considered for use in C++ projects, and I would expect that there are many cases of mixed D and C++ usage among the D success stories. Rust's lack of C++-compatibility story (I will be interested to hear how Mozilla integrate it with their C++ code!) is really what's holding the language back for my use-cases. The C ABI may be the lingua franca of low-level code, but a significant amount of native code is written in C++ and I need to interface with it natively via the platform's dominant C++ ABI. D would really shine in mixed C++ projects, but it really needs a turnkey solution for intellisense integration, i.e. better tooling. It would also need seamless debugger integration, letting me trivially step through D, C++ and C code in a mixed setting, and letting me place breakpoints, watch memory, etc. |
There was a good blog post about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588543