Back when Andrei Alexandrescu was working at Facebook, I had hoped that Facebook would adopt D as a standard language. That didn't happen, and it seems unlikely that D will get a powerful corporate sponsor. I think that would have greatly helped D not just in terms of resources, but also in terms of popularity.
In an ideal world, good programming languages would win or lose on their own merits, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the world we actually live in.
We are not yet up to Facebook power at weka.io but we fully use D and support some development of it. We have also released recently a library we use internally for user space threads and other support stuff, called mecca.
D is really nice and very effective, even for a soft real-time system like ours. Most of our code didn't do any GC but where we don't care too much we can make our life a little easier.
> good programming languages would win or lose on their own merits
Well I suppose that depends on what you mean by "merits". D has struggled with things like IDE support and breaking changes. A lot of that is now cleared up or being worked on as the language has seen increased activity over the last few years. I expect remaining issues to get cleaned up in the near future.
Another thing that kept folks away was the garbage collector. Quite a lot of work is being done to make it possible to use as much of the language as possible without the GC. Nonetheless, for many potential users, fear of the GC was a reason to not use D.
I think Rust is the clear winner for OS-level programming. I'm not at all sure that it's the right solution for application-level programming. I think Go got two things right for the statically compiled application-level space: Fast compile times and garbage collection. Of course I feel like they got everything else wrong [1], but that's what we've got in that space right now. I think that D might be a much better fit for this space, but it doesn't matter because Go has sucked up all the oxygen.
[1] I realize that this is not a universally held opinion, but it certainly seems to be pretty widely held.
JS, Python and Ruby have zero compile times and GC; at least JS and Python 3 have a reasonable and widely understood approach to concurrency (if not true parallelism).
Kotlin has reasonable compile times, GC of course, and also a reasonable concurrency story.
Go apparently has other special features, like making a single binary, and having very low-delay GC. Also, it's very simple; it's basically a pared-down Modula-2 with the Oberon's methods thrown in. It also got non-fitting magic features added, like returning two values (not a tuple), or built-in generic functions (like `make(chan)`) without generics anywhere else, etc. These do not fit well, which makes many people sad.
JS, Python, or Ruby have zero ahead of time compile & link time. They need some time to generate byte code, to compile the code "just in time", to load source or byte code from disk etc.
You can have lots of expressivity without having that many features.
But go has neither, and things like no operator overloading just plain sucks when dealing with vectors, for example.
Rust's cutting edge compiler is free, for one thing. I love Ada, but Adacore may well have killed any chance it had of being a commercially viable language (its use declines precipitously each year, even in the defense and avionics industries where it used to be strong).
Plus, Rust has a thriving community whereas thanks to Adacore, Ada has a dying one. Community is critical for programming languages.
But otherwise, Ada is a brilliant and ultra safe language whose safety features go far beyond the memory and type safety that Rust features.
according to wikipedia, their 'free' compiler is GPL without a linking exception. the comparison chart on their page also says it is 'for open source GPL software'.
GPL for an OS is I've thing. GPL for a compiler and runtime is entirely another, since only the latter forces any project you create with it too carry the GPL license.
One technical reason is Rust has safe dynamic (de)allocation (and without a GC), whereas I believe Ada misses that large segment of the "market" (it theoretically allows a GC, but IIRC the implementations do not support that meaningfully). I could be wrong, but I don't think there's anything quite to the same degree in Ada but missing from Rust.
Ada has RAII via controlled types and allows for memory pools.
Also Ada allows for compiler assisted runtime allocation. For example, you can declare a datastructure with the size you want, and if it fits the stack it will be allocated, otherwise you get an exception.
Deallocation C style requires the Uncheked_Deallocation package.
Ada 95 removed GC from the standard, as no compiler ever bothered to implement it.
Not familiar with the deps of Ada memory management. It has a form of checked RAII, but no idea if it’s done via linear types. However Ada still has a more sophisticated type system for refined typed, aka sub-integer or float types. See [0] for a discussion on Rust issues.
If you combine Ada with Spark you get some (still) amazing compile type proof checking of projects. [1]
Rust _could_ develop to have similar abilities (I hope!). But it’d need more generalized linear types or dependent types. Though one could write macros with stargeted higher level type checking DSL for, say, embedded development targets.
Do you mean winner in terms of popularity or in terms of quality? In terms of popularity, it's pretty clear we are in for at least a decade of C++ & Javascript.
I'm curious, what are your thoughts on Nim? I've used it a little, and compile has always seemed fast. It has garbage collecting on by default, and other language niceties. I feel like it fairs pretty well as an application language.
IDE support came from the community as an intellij addon, which jetbrains then officially sponsored. But they didn't decide to throw their own resources at making such a thing from scratch.
Jetbrains has sponsored an alternative to the RLS, Rust Language Server.
The RLS is used in VSCode, I think Atom, I’ve seen a port for Emacs, and I think Sublime.
The community effort is behind the RLS, the Jetbrains plugin for IntelliJ doesn’t use any of the Rust compiler, as far as I’m aware, but it does have a lot of fans, so they’re doing something right.
As a Java fan of IntelliJ, I still prefer the RLS+VSCode, but it’s great seeing all the IDEs being developed for Rust!
In an ideal world, good programming languages would win or lose on their own merits, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the world we actually live in.