Why is D unpopular

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Saturday, 30 April 2022 at 07:07:31 UTC, Tobias Pankrath wrote:
> Sometimes a good idea from academia needs a practical example 
> (D in this case) to show its usefulness before I sees 
> widespread adoption. That doesn't mean that it was invented by 
> D, or that there is no prior art.

Speeding up execution by evaluating functions where the input is 
known is the first thing you think about when considering 
optimizations. This practice predates the existance of most CS 
departments. People even did it without compiler support decades 
before D came into existance, one common generic strategy was to 
core dump a program right before it request user input and then 
turn the core dump into an executable.

Languages like C were designed for limited semantics and fast 
compilation and essentially relied on the programmer for 
optimization rather than the compiler, because clever compilers 
were slow and were costly to develop. C++ tried to turn C into a 
proper high level language, but ended up triggering bastardized 
template programming practices that never should have existed, 
which in turn triggered what D programmers think of as CTFE. So 
it is more a result of poor C++ practice than cleverness. You 
have improved on the terrible C++ template practice, but still 
dont have a solution for compiler performance or debugging.