> Side note: D actually predates a lot of this by being from 2001, but, sadly, never seemed to get any traction. It seems like it had the misfortune of being about 10 years too early and that programmers just weren't ready for a new systems programming language at that point.

I was only a kid starting my university degree at that time, but I had been coding since I was 9 and I was very excited about D. What I remember is that getting it up and running was a cumbersome, fully manual process. The compiler was closed-source, delivered as a tarball without any kind of installation script, ditto for the libraries. I wrote some little programs and I liked the language, but in the end I gave up.

On the other hand, Rust has rustup and Cargo which are just amazing. I am sure that a big part of Rust's popularity comes from Cargo.