IIRC it was weird and not that great in D1 era, and stalled for a very long time. There were also two competing incompatible runtimes.

Then came the D2 re-write which broke backwards compatibility and took another few years.

In the meantime everyone moved on

> D2 re-write

No such thing happened. D has always been built on the same codebase, and the labels "D1" and "D2" are just arbitrary points on a mostly linear evolution (in fact, the tags D 1.0 and D 2.0 came only 6 months apart; 1.0 was just meant to be a long term support branch, not a different language. It was the addition of `const` that broke most code around release 2.6 but if you update those, old and new compilers generally work.

I'd say where D failed was its insistence on chasing every half-baked trend that someone comments on Hacker News. Seriously, look at this very thread, Walter is replying to thing after thing saying "D has this too!!" nevermind if it actually is valuable irl or not.