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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

> never driven by big enough companies

Not sure that's true. One of the first adopters of D in production was Facebook, because one of the engineers (Andrei Alexandrescu) worked there and evangelised it heavily internally. Many projects were written in D. But eventually the cost of maintaining support for one more language in production didn't make sense. D didn't solve problems that C++ (another supported language at Facebook) didn't. The D code was rewritten. It's not that Big Tech didn't adopt it. It's that it didn't show enough value in time.

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Those days D2 was probably not ready to be adopted in prod anyway and Andrei worked as a research scientist on a specific problem so I don't think he was on "that" level of corporate influence. He then left FB to work fully on D.

When you read about D and why it is not popular, one thing to keep in mind, is that there was D1 for a long time and then came D2 and this process was not as smooth as it could be. The dev progress was and stays slow but steady. D is in a better place today than it was 3 years ago for example.

Andrei Alexandrescu went back to C++ and is working at NVidia CUDA nowadays.

He's the Vice President of the D Language Foundation, although he's not contributing as he used to.

It's safe to say his salary is high enough that Rob Pike would have done the same thing. Important to note that he left his D leadership position years before moving to NVidia and he's still involved with the language.

Facebook didn't hire a dozen people to develop the compiler and ecosystem.

> Many projects were written in D.

What's your source on this?

Internal document at Meta written to explain why Meta only officially supported 3 languages at the time for server side development - Hack, C++ and Python. Rust is supported as well now, bringing the total number to 4 (https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/progra...). The post explained why D was used at one point, but the use was phased out.

I no longer have access, but if a Meta employee is reading this, I'm referring to a post that called Alexandrescu a "whirlwind of energy" in terms of how he personally encouraged and enabled teams to adopt D for projects.

Hmm, yeah, I never saw any internal stuff (I'm just a random person on the internet), but my impression from public info is they had a few isolated individuals experiment with it on small projects but the company never formally adopted it or supported it for anything serious.

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