> Walter and I have had a long conversation about the next radical thing > to do to improve D's standing. Like others in this community, we believe > it's a good time to consider bootstrapping the compiler. Having the D > compiler written in D has quite a few advantages, among which taking > advantages of D's features and having a large codebase that would be its > own test harness.
Two points from the viewpoint of the Debian distribution: Debian is ported to many different platforms and in average one new platform port started every year. A huge pain point for porters are circular (or self) dependencies. A lot of effort goes into breaking such circles. So in the moment the D language is great in that it does not introduce a new circular dependency. It would be a pity to lose this. The second important thing for Debian (and Fedora and others) is licensing. It's a pity that DMD isn't free software and I believe DMD not being in distros is one reason for the low popularity of D. It's hard to learn D with gdc while all tutorials are based on DMD. So instead of a rewrite of D, it would rather be important (from my humble point of view) to replace non-free parts of DMD. Thank you, Thomas Koch