Why is D unpopular?

[Paul Backus]

On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 15:36:34 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/29/2022 7:56 AM, Paul Backus wrote:
>> On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 07:56:15 UTC, bauss wrote:
>>> I think his point was that D seems to favor library-only 
>>> solutions in a lot of cases and then the syntactic sugar is 
>>> never added properly.
>>>
>>> No matter how good your library solutions are then you can 
>>> never implement async/await in a clear fashion without the 
>>> compiler emitting you a state machine for it.
>> 
>> The dirty secret here is that the code quality of the DMD 
>> fronted has deteriorated to the point where it is basically 
>> impossible to do a correct, complete implementation of any 
>> non-trivial language feature. So we can either have a library 
>> solution that works, but has ugly syntax; or we can have a 
>> language solution that has nice syntax, but doesn't work.
>
> I don't know what the rewrites of async/await would be. If 
> someone would write that down, I doubt it would be that hard. 
> After all, I got ImportC to work :-/

I would hardly call ImportC's implementation "correct" and 
"complete" at this point, given the large number of outstanding 
bugs and the fact that it does not even support the preprocessor 
yet.

This is exactly what people mean when they call features of D 
"incomplete" or "unfinished" or "half-assed": the happy path 
works, but important features are missing and the edge cases are 
riddled with bugs.

I'm sure ImportC will improve, given enough time--maybe 3-5 
years? But outside of a tiny number of core developers such as 
yourself who work on D full-time, it is unrealistic to expect an 
open-source contributor to see a project of that scale through to 
completion. That's what I really mean by "basically impossible". 
Not that it literally cannot be done, but that the amount of time 
and effort required is prohibitive for the vast majority of 
contributors.