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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

D has been around for longer but Rust and Go both have (I'd guess) on the order of 100 full time staff each. D has something like 3 at most.

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I guess it's a case of quality over quantity.

D developers are all experts in the art of crafting compilers and language design.

9 women can't make a baby in a month

As a occasional contributor I can attest that most people on the D forums/GitHub are very sharp, although (I do not like Go) Rust's team seem excellent too (albeit slightly more academic?)

The rustc developers are excellent as well.

Never said the contrary.

Imagine what they can do in 19 years.

Go GC has some smart people working on it too.

And Go, by the virtue of having less features, has to allocate quite more. Eg: Go doesn't have lazy ranges / streams. Dynamic dispatch using interfaces has to allocate memory on heap.

Also, I expect D standard library to be optimized for Non-GC use case at least a part of it, because that's one of its use cases.

Compiler's escape analysis matters too. I'm told Go's escape analysis is not very sophisticated.

Last, it may be case of missing features in D version as a comment mentioned.

Post-hoc: I'd say that it's easier to communicate between 3 people than between 100. And, so, it's more likely that 3 people will be able to maintain a system where they each have a pretty clear understanding of the whole thing.

I would not have predicted D would be better than Rust in any measure if those are the number of maintainers.

I'd guess that the larger team must be able to do more. "Faster alone, further together".

What? Rust has less than 5 full time paid devs. And with the fall of Mozilla it's shrinking. But yeah external contributors summed up are a big human resource

But how many companies outside Mozilla use rust in a capacity to contribute to the compiler, standard library, and crate ecosystem? e.g. Now rust is in chromium if Google want stuff fixing they can pay for it to be done in the same way that Linux is developed mainly by 9-5ers not working directly for the Linux project specifically. D has no paid developers at all full time IIRC (Walter Bright is living off his empire empire I think).

Go has Google's direct backing, which is more what I was pointing towards.

According to the recent blog post that was on the front page, Chromium is still exploring the possibility of using Rust. They’ve yet to commit.

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