Microsoft's .NET Team Open-Sources CoreCLR

[rdnetto]

To be perfectly honest with you, D never stood a chance. No big important open source projects were written in D, and it's not really native anywhere (There are no GUI toolkits or Desktops written in D), and as a result there wasn't really the required bait to cause a shift. C++11 basically killed it's chance to compete with C++, and it was never really a competitor for Java and the like.

Now, C# is poised to eat Java's lunch, but it's still up in the air what effect it will have on C++ and C for non-performance-critical applications. I wouldn't be too surprised to see it make inroads once Qt# hits though, I know that once that hits I don't really intend to start any new projects in C++.

I agree. Even Facebook, which employs some of the key D developers, pushes Hack much more strongly. Although I'm not hugely familiar with C++, AIUI D has features that never made it into C++11, like template constraints and better meta-programming. I suppose C++11 is 'good enough' though, especially given its level of usage and support.

Platform-independent C# with Qt# would definitely be a killer language + toolkit. I was actually working on some Qt bindings for D at one point, before life got in the way. The funny thing about DQt was there were something like 6 different people working on different approaches, and the only thing they could agree on was the name...