D gets no respect. It's a solid language with a lot of great features and conveniences compared to C++ but it barely gets a passing mention (if that) when language discussions pop up. I'd argue a lot of the problems people have with C++ are addressed with D but they have no idea.

Could say the same for Nim.

But popularity/awareness/ecosystem matter.

If the difference in performance between the target language and C++ is huge, it's probably not the language that's great, but some quirk of implementation.