I don't know what you mean by effective - I can come up with several different/conflicting definitions in this context.
I think what you meant to say is popular. If a feature is popular it doesn't matter how bad it turns out in hindsight: you can't remove it without breaking too much code (you can slowly deprecate it over time, I'm not sure how you handle deprecation in D, so perhaps that is what editions give you). However if a great feature turns out not to be used you can remove it (presumably to replace it with a better version that you hope people will use this time, possibly reusing the old syntax in a slightly incompatible way)
Yeah dude but you've really marketed D poorly. I remember looking at D what must be 15 years back or so? And I loved the language and was blown away by its beauty and cool features. But having no FOSS compiler and the looming threat of someone claiming a patent (back then it was unclear that Mono/C# was "legal" and even Java hung in the balance) was too scary for me to touch it.
Now I'm old and I believe D has missed its opportunity. Kinda sad.
Open source and free software isn't the same thing. Nobody made a claim on Java either, until someone did. I just distinctly remember explicitly not exploring D for that reason. Also this way way before LLVM and I also don't think GNU had a D compiler back then. There was only the (and I really believe it was closed source) Digital Mars compiler.
15 years ago, both LLVM and GNU had a D compiler. gdc (the GNU compiler) was not an official part of the gcc collection, but it was definitely there and 100% open source.
All three compilers shared the open source D front end. The DMD backend source code was available for anyone to use, it just couldn't be redistributed. We were eventually able to fully Boost license it.
The DMD compiler always had source available for free from Digital Mars. I never sold a single copy :-)
