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Walter Bright has said on several occasions that compilation speed was one of his design goals for D.

Recently on the "On the Metal" podcast (which is fantastic) Johnathon Blow had a mini rant on compilation speeds and mentioned that the Jai compiler is incredibly fast.

Jai apparently — I think it's mentioned in that podcast — has a dedicated backend for debug builds that's optimized for fast code generation and doesn't use LLVM. Sounds like what Cranelift is trying to do for Rust.

This seems to be the move for languages moving forward.

That is already the approach in Lisp, Scheme, Java, .NET, mainframe language environments, OCaml, Haskell, Eiffel, Dart, D and plenty others.

By having a mix of interpreters, repls, JIT and AOT compilers, one can mix and match, using the fastest ones for development and the slow ones for the final release build.

If I'm reaching for Rust it's more than likely because I want it's borrow checker and pattern matching on enumerated types.

To my knowledge D has neither of those so it's not really in the running here.

A borrow checker is currently in development for d, and pattern matching has been pseudo-implemented with metaprogramming.

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