Let me throw my uneducated and biased opinion on the table.
It's amazing how Rust development and popularity progressed over the years. Uncompromising features, no trade-offs except for complexity and compilation speed but what language is ideal, right?
For me personally, D was just easier and faster to learn than C/C++/Rust. I got basically the same speed without memory management and learning curve overhead. Coming from Python land I enjoyed fast rdmd compile-and-run times that made me feel like I am working with an interpreted language while having much more control and access to the system. Nowadays, D forum, IRC is so helpful that I get an answer within minutes. I expected quite the opposite considering how smaller the community is.
So, these are my reasons for why D. You can see that I didn't care whether the language was backed up by some global company or was trendy. I got tired of Python that fallbacks to C/C++ when performance matters and if you want some real work done good luck with C/C++. JVM based languages were also not my cup of tea due to memory appetites and being comparably slower. D came as a surprise managing to be faster both in execution and compilation. It is later that I learnt about some of the shortcomings, smaller community, fewer available libraries, etc. etc.
It's amazing how Rust development and popularity progressed over the years. Uncompromising features, no trade-offs except for complexity and compilation speed but what language is ideal, right?
For me personally, D was just easier and faster to learn than C/C++/Rust. I got basically the same speed without memory management and learning curve overhead. Coming from Python land I enjoyed fast rdmd compile-and-run times that made me feel like I am working with an interpreted language while having much more control and access to the system. Nowadays, D forum, IRC is so helpful that I get an answer within minutes. I expected quite the opposite considering how smaller the community is.
So, these are my reasons for why D. You can see that I didn't care whether the language was backed up by some global company or was trendy. I got tired of Python that fallbacks to C/C++ when performance matters and if you want some real work done good luck with C/C++. JVM based languages were also not my cup of tea due to memory appetites and being comparably slower. D came as a surprise managing to be faster both in execution and compilation. It is later that I learnt about some of the shortcomings, smaller community, fewer available libraries, etc. etc.