Why is D unpopular?

Iain Buclaw ibuclaw at gdcproject.org
Fri Nov 5 09:16:39 UTC 2021


On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 23:33:05 UTC, arco wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 23:13:34 UTC, Adam Ruppe wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 23:08:54 UTC, arco wrote:
>>> This first one is historic: for a long time, D was not open 
>>> source
>>
>> This is not true. Really persistent myth but easy to prove 
>> that it was GPL'd as early as 2002. gdc's predecessor was out 
>> by 2003, also GPL licensed.
>
> But at what point did D become truly usable using open source 
> compilers? GDC was only declared feature complete, supported 
> and merged upstream in GCC 9.0, that is in 2019. Both Go and

I would like to know where you read that GDC wasn't feature 
complete for nearly 20 years.

> Rust came with open source, production quality, reference 
> compilers since day 1. It really makes a difference.
>

Actually, using your logic with GDC, you can say because it isn't 
merged into GCC, Rust is actually *not* open source, feature 
complete, supported, or truly usable.

> Have you got some information about the early GPL'd compiler? 
> My understanding is that DMD only became open source some time 
> around 2014, was there another early project?

Watch my talk on GDC which covers the timeline of early D 
compilers (BrightD, OpenD, DLI, GDMD, and a few others). :-)

In short, open source - and more specifically porting to Linux - 
was always talked about since day one really, and Walter released 
the source code in 2002 in order to let the community do this.  
It took about two years before there was eventually one that was 
almost feature complete - DGCC, later to be known most commonly 
as GDC.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list