February 12, 2026
Comeback or copium?
D Programming Language
Back on the front page—fans swoon, haters yell “forced meme”
TLDR: D resurfaced pitching speed and ease—fast like C with friendlier safety—and its fans say it should’ve been the winner. The comments split between wistful supporters and skeptics yelling “forced meme” and “sock accounts,” arguing Rust and Zig already captured the developer crowd.
D just barged back into the spotlight promising “fast code, fast,” a language that feels friendly while still running at top speed. It touts auto type detection (so you write less boilerplate), memory that mostly manages itself, and the option to go full power-user when needed. Think: the speed of C with guard rails, plus the escape hatch for daredevils. The official D language page reads like a wish list—clean syntax, built-in arrays, easy testing, even safe-by-default concurrency—and the crowd noticed.
Cue the drama. One camp swooned: user KnuthIsGod sighed that D’s rules for who “owns” data are easier than Rust’s and compile times are snappy—“in a better world, we’d all be using D.” But skeptics pounced, calling D a “forced meme” whose window closed while Rust and Zig stole the buzz. The meta-moment? A commenter asked why this is even on the front page and hinted at “sock accounts” juicing the votes. Nostalgia broke through as fans praised D legend Andrei Alexandrescu’s classic C++ book and shared his bike-shed-busting talk, Choose Your Poison. The mood? A mix of wistful “the one that got away,” eye-rolling “we already chose not to,” and a collective, theatrical Sigh.
Key Points
- •D combines dynamic-like coding with static type inference, enabling concise code and generic functions with type-safe deductions.
- •Automatic memory management is the default, with deterministic cleanup via RAII and scope statements such as scope(exit).
- •Built-in arrays, associative arrays, slices, and ranges simplify stream processing and data manipulation.
- •D supports multiple paradigms—polymorphism, value semantics, functional style, generics, generative and contract programming—with examples of interfaces and immutability models.
- •D compiles to efficient native code and allows low-level control when needed, including C interop, manual memory management, and inline assembly.