I hear it's a bit better these days, but my "better C++" interests lie in Rust nowadays. That said, this link is one of the ways D is strictly better: since it's been around a while, there's more educational information out there.
Pretty much everyone uses D2 these days unless they are maintaining a legacy system written in D1 and transitioning to D2 isn't worth the effort in their case.
Phobos versus Tango hasn't been an issue for years. In fact, in D2 you can use Phobos and Tango side by side[1].
Rust is very interesting and I'm excited to see where it is headed but it's still rather immature compared to something like D.
Right, hence the 'I hear it's a bit better these days.' Maybe I should have been more clear.
> I'm not sure what licensing issues you've had
The whole time I was using the language, there was the dual licensed aspect of the compiler, where the front end (I think?) was not open, but the back end was? Or maybe the other way around? I think I heard that Walter ended up OSSing the entire thing. As a strong BSD proponent I find complex licensing requirements tiring.
> but it's still rather immature compared to something like D.
Right, I thought I said this too.
The good news is that GDC (gcc backend) and LDC (LLVM backend) both produce faster binaries than DMD and are completely open source. The only downside is they tend to be a version or two behind DMD (which at DMD's release rate is around 3-6 months or so I'd say). Also, LDC isn't available for Windows primarily because LLVM doesn't yet support SEH exceptions.
In any case, the compiler's licensing doesn't affect software you write in D.
Even for a while after the phobos/tango thing 'was resolved,' people were still bitter/split over it.
Like I said, I'm glad things are better nowadays.
http://dconf.org/talks/buclaw.html
There's also LDC led by David Nadlinger:
The biggest thing that D is better at is having been around for a much longer time. There's way more docs and users.
(it's a substantial amount... or it just decides to break conventions, which dmd did also with it's '-offilename' type flags.)
Rust is also harder to learn, and it seems (to me) to also be more difficult to use C libraries from Rust than D. I cut my teeth on D by creating a few bindings, and I really struggle to do the same in Rust.
Just my experiences...
PS - Rereading this it occurs to me that D is probably just as complex as Rust, but it 'feels' less complex due to syntax familiarity.