Why is D unpopular?

[Rumbu]

On Monday, 8 November 2021 at 13:59:30 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
>
> The language mandates a GC as design, meaning: you cannot 
> remove the GC and use the full language.
>
> What is needed is more of a layered approach.

Yes, but it can be a deterministic gc like reference counting. 
Pascal (modern one) did it from the beginning 20 years ago with 
strings, dynamic arrays and interfaces and nobody from the "every 
cpu cycle counts" camp complained about it. Interfaces in pascal 
resolved also the class/struct pointer dichotomy: use a class if 
you want to manage memory yourself, use an interface implemented 
by that class if you want that we take care of the deallocation.

I wonder if the !gc crowd will be happy with ARC built in 
language.