about interfacing to d:
There was some kind of tool out there that is never mentioned on one of the d websites called swig. If you can make it extremely easy and get the bugs out of the way (maybe even write a decent tutorial on it which I really need) linking to c++ would be a breeze.
as for promoting the d programming language I think you should start with wikipedia. I stranded here because I was sick of java's tunnel-visioned object-oriented too verbose syntax. c++ was just too damn ugly to look at so I played a bit with scale/python/c#,... In my search to other languages I looked up all languages with a similar style to java and saw a page about D and thought by myself "yet another letter of the alphabet". I kept reading though and saw the code examples. It looked beautiful.
But then I read a bit further and saw all it's shortcommings. still interested I went to the digitalmars homepage and got lost somewhere over there with D1 and D2. After that I went to dsource and saw dead forums and outdated projects so I gave up on D.
A bit later though I read something about D which was prety recent with a lot of great responses on so I went back to the digitalmars homepage and tried the newsgroups. Luckely they were very vivid.
Next big step: learning the language. A lot was similar to java but I wanted to learn about those features getting promoted in debates against c++. I found some tutorials on D but they were not sufficient to learn from. Luckely alexandrescu's book was so complete, well writen and easy to follow.
I think to increase D's popularity one could
- increase ease of linking to c(++) (maybe through swig?)
- rewrite the wikipedia page (seriously)
- revamp dsource. It would be great to see news from the blog "the one with d" apearing on the dsource homepage. A lot of dead projects should be archived and one should mention in the forums that a better place to try is the d newsgroup.
- write some tutorials (always helps)
- get D on some benchmark charts
Great to see someone so motivated joining, good luck :)