You probably have Swift in the same niche... and more elegant, not completely ignoring the last few decades of language research etc. If you want something more minimalistic there's Zig. D is just "C++ + hindsight", nothing special, only extra fragmentation of dev ecosystem by bringing in another language.

Ofc, Apple is not MS, so Swift developer experience and docs kind of suck (if you're not in the "iOS bubble" where it's nice and friendly), and multiplatform dev experience especially sucks even worse...

And "easier to pick up and code in" might not necessarily be an advantage for a systems language - better start slowly putting the puzzle together in your head, and start banging up code others need to see only after you've internalized the language and its advanced features and when (not) to use them! It helps everyone in the long run. This is one reason why I'd bet on Rust!

"completely ignoring the last few decades"

Well, for fairness, D is quite a bit older than Swift. (It's nearly as much older than Swift as it is younger than C++!) But what do you think pushes Swift out of the "C++ with hindsight" basket?

Maybe some big FAANG company. Start at the beginning of the acronym, I guess. I wonder if anyone could persuade anyone at Facebook to do a little bit of D professionally. I bet if even one serious Facebook engineer made a serious effort to use D, its adoption woes would be over.

Facebook is unlikely to move to D at this point and already has multiple serious projects in Rust (that they’re happy about, AFAIK).

Walter Bright the author of D worked at Facebook writing a fast preprocessor for C/C++ in D.

Alexandrescu, too.

They also talked about it pretty frequently.

Maybe ggp's claim that D just needs a heavy hitter backing it might be misplaced.

I don't think it's misplaced. Facebook wasn't really backing D by hiring them. And it doesn't seem like that specific project is active anymore.

Walter too? AFAIK it was just Andrei.

I thought Facebook used to “unofficially” support D? Or am I mixing languages up?

Right now, I think eBay is one of the big companies that uses D.

Edit: Sibling comment beat me to it.

That is what MS is doing with C#/F# and .NET Native/Xamarin AOT/CoreRT, with the experience taken from Midori.

So I doubt they would sponsor D.

C# is an attempt of making Java good, F# is an attempt of making a subset of Haskell popular. .Net Native/Xamarin/CoreRT are UI frameworks. There is nothing there that would compete with C++.

I don't think MS has any interest in improving C++ (look at their compiler). But that's not because of competing activities.

Except the lessons learned from Midori and .NET Native on UWP.

Visual C++ is the best commercial implementation of C++ compilers, better not be caught using xlc, aCC, TI, IAR, icc and plenty of other commercial offerings.

If C++ has span, span_view, modules, co-routines, core guidelines, lifetime profile static analyser, is it in large part to work started and heavily contributed by Microsoft on ISO, and their collaboration with Google.

As for competing with C++, it is quite clear, specially when comparing the actual software development landscape with the 90's, that C++ has lost the app development war.

Nowadays across all major consumer OSes it has been relegated to the drivers and low level OS services layer like visual compositor, graphics engine, GPGPU binding libraries.

Ironically, from those mainstream OSes, Microsoft is the only one that still cares to provide two UI frameworks directly callable from C++.

Which most Windows devs end up ignoring in favour of the .NET bindings, as Kenny Kerr mentions in one of his talks/blog posts.

Back to the D issue, Azure IoT makes use of C# and Rust, and there is Verona at MSR as well, so as much I would like to see them spend some effort on D, I don't see it happening.

CoreRT is an UI frameworks, what ?