I would position D on a spectrum between Go and Rust. Go is roughly where you would end up if you trimmed down D to its bare bones: a pretty fast GC language w

I would position D on a spectrum between Go and Rust. Go is roughly where you would end up if you trimmed down D to its bare bones: a pretty fast GC language with a native runtime that can do some memory manipulation if needed, where the focus is on providing a single idiom that works for every task. D is more like the C++er's take on that idea. It has templates, it has annotations galore, lots of convenience features, lots of low level features, and it's gradually repositioning to depend less on the GC and get some similar "manual but safe" memory functionality of Rust. It can be a bit intimidating, but you can be productive with it relatively quickly if you write Go-like code, and add the extra stuff in gradually. That gives it leverage as a language that really grows with your project and lets you go into fine-grain detail where you need it. Rust is like Go in that it's at an uncompromising extreme of the memory-safety spectrum. Borrow checking(and its resulting patterns, which are typically considered idiomatic in modern C++) is in at the core and it's not going away. This makes it great for code that needs to scale out to the extremes of something like a web browser, where the codebase cannot "do one thing well" anymore and needs tight control over resources, concurrency, and safety all in the same package. There are reasons to find any of these three unfavorable - the harshest critics might say Go is "braindead", D is "a mess", Rust is "too strict". I believe all three are here to stay. I would also lump in Zig here as a second axis of the equation. Where the other languages all have ambitions about memory safety, Zig makes no bones about being unsafe: it aims to be a direct replacement to C, which cleans up every other aspect - areas where the standard is unclear, where more checks around boundary conditions are possible, and where modernization would be of immediate help, e.g. a compilation system that does not involve the C preprocessor or header files. Zig isn't hostile about memory safety - there's willingness to explore it, but the approach is conservative. This positions it as the ultimate "low-level library" language, where the programmer goes in with a straightforward goal and can reasonably expect to know what every last byte does.