Clouudy's comments

TBH I don't necessarily think that ecosystem is what matters in every application, but it is necessary for most people, I agree. And I do agree with finishing a lot of the half-baked features too, but I'm unsure if the people maintaining the language have the will or the means to do that.

Do you have any other ideas about how D could stand out again?

You have any specific complaints about Phobos and a standard library you like?

If it makes you feel better I have some projects that I'm working on in order to improve the tooling. Would you mind listing out all of the things you think are missing, so I can work on those once I get the other ones done?

There are third party libraries for the language that don't use the GC, but as far as I know there isn't a standardized one that people pick.

I do agree with you that there needs to be a good framework though. Either in Web or Games. Web because it's more familiar than Go but also has Fibers, and Games because it's an easier C++. There is also Inochi2D which looks rather professional: https://inochi2d.com/

One of the issues I've seen in the community is just that there aren't enough people in the community with enough interest and enough spare time to spend on a large project. Everyone in the core team is focused on working on the actual language (and day-jobs), while everyone else is doing their own sort of thing.

From your profile you seem to have a lot of experience in the field and in software in general, so I'd like to ask you if you have any other advice for getting the language un-stuck, especially with regards to the personnel issues. I think I'd like to take up your proposal for a web framework as well, but I don't really have any knowledge of web programming beyond the basics. Do you have any advice on where to start or what features/use case would be best as well?

I wouldn't say that it's unable to make a comeback, there is still a valid use case from my experience with it. The syntax, mixed-memory model, UFCS, and compilation speed are nice quality of life features compared to C++, and it's still a native binary compared to C# and Java. So if you're starting out with a new project from scratch there's not much reason not to beyond documentation reasons. And you can interface pretty easily to C/C++ as well as pretty much any other language designed for that sort of thing, but without a lot of syntax changes like Carbon.

I imagine that the scope of its uses has shrunk as other languages caught up, and I don't think it's necessarily a good language for general enterprise stuff (unless you're dealing with C++), but for new projects it's still valid IMO. I think that the biggest field it could be used in is probably games too, especially if you're already writing a new engine from scratch. You could start with the GC and then ease off of it as the project develops in order to speed up development, for example. And D could always add newer features again too, tbh.