However, its embrace in the 1990's of garbage collection has proved its Achilles heel. Before anyone says you can write D without the garbage collection, yes you can but then you lose access to most of the standard library, and likely most third party libraries. Rust and C++ allow you not to have to use garbage collection but still use the standard library and 3rd party libraries.
With garbage collection, D is not directly competing not with C++ but with Java, Swift, Go, C# which have far more support across the industry.
However, its embrace in the 1990's of garbage collection has proved its Achilles heel. Before anyone says you can write D without the garbage collection, yes you can but then you lose access to most of the standard library, and likely most third party libraries. Rust and C++ allow you not to have to use garbage collection but still use the standard library and 3rd party libraries.
With garbage collection, D is not directly competing not with C++ but with Java, Swift, Go, C# which have far more support across the industry.