I agree with the others that having no major company behind
DLang is not helping from a money/resource/exposure point of
view. That said, there must be things we can do as a community
to help improve the situation.
I can imagine for example that the community could focus on
particular sectors where D excels, and create as much quality
content as possible about how to use D to solve problems in
those areas. Moreover having a push to get articles into the
blogosphere and social media would do wonders.
Coming from a web development background (PHP), I think D is a
wonderful language. It's expressive, elegant, performant and
fun. Based on my experience, I think web development is one of
those sectors where D could become more popular.
+1
Sorry to repeat myself, but D's built-in concurrency (fibers)
makes it a better alternative to Go for web development.
More over, as it generate fast executable at lightspeed, it can
be a very good alternative to Dart for cross mobile development.
What is lacking is just immediate usability through simple, easy
to use libraries, automatically installed along with the compiler.
My advice is to stop focusing on making D a "better language",
because it's already very usable at the moment in its current
state. I'm even afraid of some D3 proposals which could injure
more than heal in this regard.
Instead, try to make it a "better tool" for CROSS-PLATFORM mobile
and web development.
That's where the need is, that's where the hype will be.
Don't be blind, look at what Dart, Kotlin, etc offer to those who
need to implement web/mobile applications.
D can do better than them in these areas with the right mix of
official libraries and auto-promotion.
Right now I'm using Dart for Android/iOS development, and Go for
web development, despite these language s*ck compared to D.
Because they are VERY CONVENIENT and USABLE for that.
D has better language features, but what makes a language stand
above its competition are its official libraries.
Those of Go and Dart are obviously not perfect, as everybody has
different needs and ways of thinking, but many people should
agree that they are well designed in order get the job done
quickly.
So again, stop making D a better development language, make it a
better development TOOL.