[Someone1234]

D isn't really competing with anything, it never took off. It already has a smaller market share than Rust while being twice as old (almost 20 years).

I'd call D a dead language. Can a dead language compete with a growing one?

[giancarlostoro]

Facebook, Ebay, Mercedes Benz and a few others[0] don't seem to believe so. Better tell them to use a different language?

I'm on a Discord for Dlang that's quite active honestly. The D community is plenty active. Their forums and IRC. Maybe not as active as other language communities, but it's not made by Mozilla or Google which gets a lot more attention.

[0]: https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html

[umanwizard]

Facebook does not use any meaningful amount of D.

Source: I worked at Facebook for four years. My first diff at Facebook was even in D, in a project that was already effectively abandoned by the time I changed it.

It's really a tiny, insignificant minority of actively running code there, possibly zero by now.

[coldtea]

>Facebook, Ebay, Mercedes Benz and a few others[0] don't seem to believe so. Better tell them to use a different language?

The already "use a different language" for most of their stuff.

Their D use is tokenish, the way you can find any bizarro, niche language used somewhere big. That doesn't mean the language is in any kind of widespread use, just that some teams in some big company or another adopted it - as outliers.

[cmcd]

A company the size of Facebook probably has teams tinkering with all sorts of languages most companies will never use.

[eitland]

> D isn't really competing with anything,

It is competing for my attention and many others I guess.

> I'd call D a dead language. Can a dead language compete with a growing one?

I'm much more inclined to spend time with D than with a number of other popular languages if I could choose.

I don't know if I'm alone in this, but for what I know kt might become really popular in the future. (Look to Erlang for an example of a language that went unnoticed for a couple of decades or so.)

FWIW Rust is on top of my list of languages I want to master if I should get time.

[stjohnswarts]

I always wondered why D didn't take off in the fintech industry instead of C++

[p0nce]

D practionners aren't really on internet forums, let alone internet forums with a bias for whatever is new and status-enhancing (HN). Because the presumed attacks on D are constant, it's become very tiring to answer that no, it's not dead, and it's growing. The real test is in the trenches, not in a factless debate.

[Someone1234]

You want to talk facts, it ranks so low on Github's usage (based on Github's own API) that it isn't even ranked in the top 25 languages:

https://github.com/benfred/github-analysis/#inferring-langua...

Rust by contrast is 16th and trending upwards year on year. So these D users that are missing from internet forums are also missing from checking in actual code.

You talk about the lack of facts, but I can link you to Stackoverflow's survey, Github's usage, Google Trends, and show you that D isn't doing very well. Where's your facts here? Where is this evidence of a large number of quiet D programmers?

So let's talk facts, I have, your turn.

[iudqnolq]

I have never used D, but possibly developers at boring companies aren't checking in code to public Github repositories?

[p0nce]

TIOBE index. Besides, I'm not interested in being right on HN.

[Someone1234]

TIOBE index shows it in decline. It peaked in 2009 and has fallen since then. It has fallen from 1.8% peak to under 1% (0.93%). Which, even if it was still 1.8% would be terrible for an almost 20 year old language.

I'm not sure how a language that is in decline, and hasn't grown much in its life, isn't a dying language (I'd argue dead at under 1% after that long).

> I'm not interested in being right on HN.

So you show up, call out other posters for having a "factless debate," to which they respond with facts. They then ask you for the same and instead of providing them to prove your point, you're suddenly not interested in a discussion on HN? That seems like bad faith posting to me.

[p0nce]

It seems you have a lot of energy to spend on this online debate, and I do not.