Relevant comment

I don’t use Rust much, but I agree with the thrust of the article. However, I do think that the borrowchecker is the only reason Rust actually caught on. In my opinion, it’s really hard for a new language to succeed unless you can point to something and say “You literally can’t do this in your language”

Without something like that, I think it just would have been impossible for Rust to gain enough momentum, and also attract the sort of people that made its culture what it is.

Otherwise, IMO Rust would have ended up just like D, a language that few people have ever used, but most people who have heard of it will say “apparently it’s a better safer C++, but I’m not going to switch because I can technically do all that stuff in C++”

D has a lot of other reasons why it haven’t caught on.

• The language is way too similar to both C and C++. In fact, you can get C and C++ code working in D with minimal changes (most annoying part is int meaning different things in both languages), and nowadays I can pull the conversion off on the regular. It’s like the only changes that were made to the language are making things more consistent, making things work better. etc. Rust is more like a language that is a marriage between C-style languages and OCaml. Rust is also a “functional first” language with the ability of opting out from the functional part, first when I’ve heard about Rust it was through this “fancy and new programming paradigm, that promises to fix everything wrong with programming”, and the D team wanted to be left out from making const the default mutability.
• The GC sounds scary for most people, who want to develop desktop applications. It’s rapid fast, will be even faster soon, and there’s tricks to either opt-out from it, or to get a @nogc thread going (using that for audio).
• Marketing issues. Walter Bright, while a genius compiler developer, is not a good marketing person.
• Formerly D was quite infamous for its toxic users, with Walter going infamous for his “let nazis code” line for a while. Allegedly, most of the toxicity moved over to openD, which made some people question why Adam D. Ruppe forked the language.
• The whole shenanigans around moving from D1 to D2, also Tango.