It's pretty well known that C++ suffers from a variety of problems. Many of them have been known about for some time. Despite this, nobody has been able to produce a truly viable alternative.<p>There have been some encouraging developments, of course. But they've had their own drawbacks that are often worse, in practice, than the problems of C++.<p>D is an example of this. A lot of new and existing C++ code probably could be written in D instead. But D lacks the widespread adoption and support that C++ offers. This translates into there being fewer third party libraries available, which increases the burden on programmers to an extent that's usually unjustifiable during commercial development And this, in turn, helps prevent the adoption of D.<p>Rust is another example. It theoretically sounds like it could be a replacement for C++, but that's only true in the far future. The language and its standard libraries have yet to show any real signs of stability. We've been hearing that there may be a 1.0 release at the end of 2014, but time is quickly running out on this. Even then, it will merely be where D is at that point. While there may be a fair number of Rust libraries in existence at this point, many of them have become broken due to language or standard library changes, many are woefully incomplete, and many are totally abandoned.<p>Then there are Java, C#, Go and others which claim to be successors or potential replacements, and perhaps this is true in a very limited subset of cases. But the remaining situations where they aren't suitable are large in number and quite critical.<p>Furthermore, we are continually seeing C++ adapt and evolve. It's getting new features and functionality that these competitors are offering, while still usually giving far more freedom and control to programmers, far better performance, far better portability, far greater practicality, and continued use for serious new software projects. These factors combine to make it an even more difficult situation for potential C++ replacements. They just may not bring enough to the table to warrant replacing C++ for a majority of its users or potential users.