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Comment by jake_the_third | Hacker News Reader

The critical faults with D that prevented it from displacing C* were that it relied on a GC by default and that it wasn't open source. Things might have played out much differently had they addressed these issues early on.

* aside from inertia, but older languages also had inertia once.

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The only issue with the GC is the implementation could get some improvements.

Mesa/Cedar, Oberon and its variants, Modula-3, Sing# and System C# might have fallen, but we still have Swift, Go, .NET Native/C# 7.3, Kotlin/Native, Nim, Crystal and Chapel, besides D.

Not all hope is lost for those of us that belive on system languages with GC support.

> The only issue with the GC is the implementation could get some improvements.

jake_the_third's point was that until relatively recently, it wasn't practical to use D without using its GC. Some folks don't want GC. Some proportion of them have good reasons.

I'm not really keeping up with D these days but I believe the "@nogc" attribute has come a long way to making it practical to use D without GC - https://dlang.org/blog/2017/06/16/life-in-the-fast-lane/

It's been open source for 10 years now.

And the BSDs have mostly moved passed the era of legal ambiguity that plagued them early in their development. For better or worse, timing and initial impressions count.

I actually like that it has a GC, it has made programming in D easier and more accessible for me. It's also a simple GC that you can force to behave if you know how. D has the @nogc attribute for the situations where one would want to disable the GC and use something else.

https://dlang.org/blog/the-gc-series/

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