C is liked particularly, even considering all its shortcomings, for being a relatively limited language in scope, being raw but flexible. D's scope seems to go

C is liked particularly, even considering all its shortcomings, for being a relatively limited language in scope, being raw but flexible. D's scope seems to go far beyond what your average C programmer would want in a language; "use only 15% of the language and you'll be fine" (paraphrasing: "use only the 'better-C' subset", if that is what you meant, and it does seem to be a subset of D) seems a weird proposition; it still complicates things, as in collaboration, idiomatic feel and look of code, the amount of knowledge required to be competent in the language, complexity of a compiler implementation, portability of code etc... and by that logic you'd have to prefer C++ over C as well (since a lot of C is valid C++), or prefer C plus one safety feature added over C; but the "rawness"/limited scope/small size/procedural nature of C is what's appealing for many to begin with. I for one think that a proper C replacement (C's strength also being the simplicity in which to implement a compiler for example, being the reason it's so ubiquitous in the embedded world) will be a much more limited proposition than D is. Edit: And having been curious, even "Better-C" still has things many C-programmers wouldn't particularly like. Going by things listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language) RAII Full metaprogramming Nested functions, nested structs, delegates and lambdas Member functions, constructors, destructors, operating overloading, etc. ... Where to draw the line will be different person to person, but D doesn't seem to be a language "in the spirit of C", or a "modern version of it", at all. Viewing it as a C++ alternative makes much more sense. A `Better-C` "limit yourself to a subset of the language" compiler flag doesn't change that much.