> Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't?

Yes. D tried to jump on the "systems programming with garbage collection" dead horse, with predictable results.

(People who want that sort of stupidity already have Go and Java, they don't need D.)

Go wasn't around when D was released and Java has for the longest time been quite horrible (I first learnt it before diamond inference was a thing, but leaving that aside it's been overly verbose and awkward until relatively recently).

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tpoacher 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Is Java even a "systems programming" language?

I don't even know what that term means anymore; but afaik Java didn't really have reliable low-level APIs until recently.

	▲	pjmlp 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Depends if one considers writing compilers, linkers, JITs, database engines, and running bare metal on embedded real time systems "systems programming".

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lelanthran 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> (People who want that sort of stupidity already have Go and Java, they don't need D.)

Go wasn't around when D was created, and Java was an unbelievable memory hog, with execution speeds that could only be described as "glacial".

As an example, using my 2001 desktop, the `ls` program at the time was a few kb, needed about the same in runtime RAM and started up and completed execution in under 100ms.

The almost equivalent Java program I wrote in 2001 to list files (with `ls` options) took over 5s just to start up and chewed through about 16MB of RAM (around 1/4 of my system's RAM).

Java was a non-starter at the time D came out - the difference in execution speed between C++ systems programs and Java systems programs felt, to me (i.e. my perception), larger than the current difference in performance between C++/C/Rust programs and Bash shell scripts.