Why D is not popular enough?

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 8/12/2016 12:14 PM, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> On 12/08/16 22:07, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 8/12/2016 7:41 AM, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>>> That table was not expensive to compute, and its constantness wasn't
>>> crucial
>>> enough even for me to put a wrapper pointer and only access it through
>>> it. Had
>>> that not been the case, and had that table been more expensive to
>>> computer, I'd
>>> probably compute at compile time with an external tool.
>>
>> What I do (and is done in building DMD) is write a program (optabgen.c)
>> to generate the tables and write a C++ source file, then compile the
>> generated file into DMD.
>
> Yes, I'm sorry. I meant to say "build time" instead of "compile time". That is
> precisely what I meant.

I'm surprised that I've never seen anyone else use such a technique. It's so 
unusual I've seen it be unrepresentable in some 'make' replacements.

I suppose it's like unittest and ddoc. Sure, you can do it with some contortions 
and/or some external tooling, but having it conveniently built in to the 
language changes everything.