User narratives on switching to D
Story 1: please state your agreement to use your name if you don't mind it being included. (It would make the account more vivid if so):
Before I was mainly using C++ for my work(and dabbled in Rust, but never ended up switching to it) D's C-like syntax inspires familiarity to the point where I truly believe that D is easier to port C code to than C++ because you can write D in a "cleaned up" C for the most part, and slowly turn it into D whereas C++ is essentially a completely different style. Not too many languages can really claim this, and IMO it's a huge boon.
D provides native performance directly on comparison with C/C++ while being much easier to jump in and bash out a few quick ideas(Phobos helps a lot with this.)
Phobos offers far more than the C++ standard library as well. It's nice not to have to go hunting for libraries, C++11 helped with this a little I guess but it just feels like "it's there," whereas Andrei/Walter seem to actively be working towards "you should always be using Phobos or it should be fixed."
Also, D's metaprogramming system is actually usable. I use CTFE to do a ton of precomputations at compiletime, I even recently learned that the compiler can unroll foreach loops in switches(! that's cool - D has a lot of neat tricks that nobody really seems to discuss,) I feel like I'm always learning new tricks in D, and not in the C++ way.
The ability to use C libraries with barely any fuss(!), I ported a C's library's headers to D in about 10 minutes using htod and a bit of manual touchup. This is a `killer feature` in my opinion.
Ranges/functional programming in general, C++ really has nothing on this. I think C++17 might be getting ranges but when I reviewed the paper they seemed far uglier and an afterthought(like most of C++), I've written large parts of my programs in purely functional style and LDC optimizes it to the equivalent imperative code.
D's operator overloading is extremely well designed IMO,(it just goes with the rest of the 'make D work the way you want it to' feeling of the rest of the language)
I feel like I could write a book on why I use D, so I'm going to stop now : )
