Some of us believe in systems programming languages with some form of GC, so it usually pops up as alternative.

For me D is what .NET (thus C#) should have been if the Ext-VOS project (COM Runtime) decided to go native, instead of embracing J++ and then turning into .NET due to the lawsuit.

But unfortunately D is a tiny community that gets by with small contributions and herding cats is hard.

A number of people (including myself) migrated from what was known as D1 onto Rust. Steve (Klabnik) was also one of the refugees. I can't speak for others, but Rust is kind of what I was expecting for D1 to go to.