Why is D unpopular?

[Walter Bright]

On 4/28/2022 9:09 PM, Araq wrote:
> On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 01:33:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Um, Zortech C++ was the first native C++ compiler on DOS in 1987. (The 
>> existing ones were all cfront based, and were terribly slow.)
> 
>  From D&E:
> 
> "The size of this overhead depends critically on the time needed to read and 
> write the intermediate C representation and that primarily depends on the disc 
> read/write strat- egy of a system. Over the years I have measured this overhead 
> on various systems and found it to be between 25% and 100% of the "necessary" 
> parts of a compilation. I have also seen C++ compilers that didn't use 
> intermediate C yet were slower than Cfront plus a C compiler."
> 
> That's not "terribly slow". And before you bring up "templates are slow to 
> compile", in 1987 cfront did not have templates.
> 
> "The earliest implementation of templates that was integrated into a compiler 
> was a version of Cfront that supported class templates (only) written by Sam 
> Haradhvala at Object Design Inc. in 1989."

Zortech C++ was about 4 times faster than cfront based C++ on DOS machines. This 
was my measurements. I agree it had nothing to do with templates. Personally I 
doubt Stroustrup had ever tried ZTC++.

I was wrong, ZTC++ came out in 1988, not 1987.


>> ZTC++ produced the first boom in use of C++, accounting for perhaps 90% of C++ 
>> use.
>>
>> This popularity lead to Borland dumping their own OOP C and going with C++, 
>> which then led to Microsoft getting on the bandwagon.
>>
>> This popularity then fed back into the Unix systems.
>>
>> No, you won't find this account in the D&E of C++ histories, but it's what 
>> actually happened.
> 
> Well that's the history as you remember it and Stroustrup does list "1st Zortech 
> C++ release" in June 1988. I cannot say if your "90%" figure is correct or not.

DOS computers were where the great mass of programmers were at the time. 90% is 
likely conservative. The programming magazines were all focused on DOS 
programming, the articles about C++ were for DOS C++ programming.

Before ZTC++, the traffic on comp.lang.c++ and comp.lang.objectivec was about 
the same, and not very much. After ZTC++, the traffic in comp.lang.c++ took off, 
and comp.lang.objectivec stagnated.