Why is D unpopular?

[Walter Bright]

On 4/30/2022 10:27 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/30/2022 12:05 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 19:10:32 UTC, 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?
>> They didn't, they got inspired by those that preceded D, you just want to 
>> believe D was the cause.
> 
> The timing suggests strongly otherwise.
> 
> C++'s discovery that templates could be used for CTFE suggests otherwise, too. 
> All those articles about it never mentioned just interpreting an ordinary 
> function instead.
> 

There is this paper from 2007:

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2235.pdf

which proposes extending constant folding to functions, as long as those 
functions are preceded by `constexpr` and consist of a single `return` 
statement. Recursion is prohibited. Only literal types permitted.

It couldn't even replace the use of template metaprogramming to compute values.

It's also a proposal. D released an implementation in 2007, that was way beyond 
n2235.