As someone who has recently chosen D for a major project (a
game/engine), I can confidently say that the biggest distinction
for me between getting start with D versus something like Go is
developer tooling. For Go I installed Go, installed a go intellij
plugin, which automatically installed gocode and I was up and
running. For D I had to install DMD (and learn about all the
different compilers)[0], install dub, install workspace-d,
install visual studio code (because the visual studio plugin had
a linking error), and then I could finally have a complete setup.
I think if dub were distributed with DMD, along with a utility to
install global programs (that way a D plugin can just call `dub
install workspace-d` or similar), it would make it very easy to
get started with D.
For reference, Cargo (Rust's package manager) allows `cargo
install`
https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1200-cargo-install.md
[0] As much as the "reference compiler vs faster compiler"
distinction, I feel like languages that have a single official
compiler that you can use for development and production (e.g.
Go/Rust) are much friendlier.
