Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slowly but steadily. Given the fact that D has not managed to die when it had so many chances to, I tell that D has better chance at mass adoption as "a better C++" than the current wave of Swift/Rust/Go that rely on "life support" from a corporate donor.
I don't think it's meaningful to put Swift, Rust and Go in a single bucket when comparing them. They're languages targeting different levels of abstraction, with very different approaches as a result. Some people refer to all of these as "better C++", but it's meant in very different and incomparable ways. For example, Rust is ostensibly a "better C++" in a sense that it retains the low-level, zero-overhead (no GC) e…
As big C++ fan and language geek, I am pretty confident that if Java and .NET had taken the route of all other alternatives in the 90's (Oberon, Eiffel, Modula-3, Delphi,...), C and C++ would be less relevant today than they turned out to be.
This because many people make use of them, just because they are the only languages they know about compilers that produce AOT executables, with the option of static linking them.
Maybe even Longhorn would have been a success, instead of having to wait for UWP with .NET Native.