Why is D unpopular?

[Walter Bright]

On 4/30/2022 12:35 AM, Max Samukha wrote:
> On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 20:17:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 4/29/2022 12:10 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> So why did other native languages suddenly start doing it after D did to the 
>>> point of it being something a language can't skip anymore?
>>
>> I've seen endless lists of features people wanted to add to C and C++. None of 
>> them were CTFE. When we added it to D, people were excited and surprised.
> 
> Your lists are not representative. When D added it, our reaction was more like 
> "finally, somebody did that!".

I'm open to a reference to one that does have it, that predates D's CTFE.


> And even today, the feature is only marginally 
> useful because of the countless forward reference bugs. I recently filed one 
> more (https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22981), which is not a CTFE bug 
> per se but was encountered in another futile attempt to generate code with CTFE 
> in a reasonable manner.

I'm sorry about the problems you encountered, but as you say they are forward 
reference issues, not about CTFE. You couldn't get that code to work in C++, 
either, because C++ does not allow forward references at all.

Thanks for submitting a well-done bug report on it.