“As for difficulties,” replied Ferguson, in a serious tone, “they were made to be overcome.”
—Jules Verne
To be honest, I haven’t yet used the D language for heavyweight projects, but after a few small coding challenges, I have been very impressed by D’s sheer speed of execution.
D is a statically typed language, which very much resembles C++ and Java, with some additional conveniences. The learning curve would not be that steep for those experienced in either of those two languages.