Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[JN]

On Friday, 19 April 2019 at 21:37:14 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Sorry, I find this statement outright ridiculous.  In the past, 
> we had only 1 compiler, and the doomsayers complained that D 
> only has 1 compiler, seeing it as proof that D is niche and not 
> worthy of attention -- because otherwise compiler writers would 
> be falling over themselves to write implementations of the 
> language and producing multiple compilers for it.  Now that we 
> have 3 compilers, the doomsayers complain that we should only 
> have 1 compiler, and see having 3 compilers as proof that 
> something is wrong.

Well, depends on which compiler is the only one. In the past it 
was DMD, and well, DMD has it's benefits, but it's codegen is not 
the greatest and it was attached to OPTLINK for way too long, 
causing a lot of headaches. It's easy to see why would people 
criticize it. If the LDC was the only compiler, I don't think 
people would complain as much (based on popular 'compiler 
framework', crossplatform, great codegen).