Why is D unpopular?

[mw]

On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 16:03:16 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>
> 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.

For this particular preprocessor issue, I think we should cut the 
scope where this ImportC's goal is: it should only take the input 
from cpp's output, .i files, instead of .h files.

1) why should D reinvent the wheels, and waste efforts which all 
those cpp have put in for the past several decades?

2) otherwise, there are so many C compilers (flavored) headers, 
does dmd want to handle them all?

After all, this is a D compiler, not a C compiler.


> 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.

I agree with all the rest, we should really cut the scopes of 
each D features, and make them stable & mature; instead of 100 
∼95% complete features, users are more happy with 10 100% 
complete features. Those ∼5% incomplete corner cases will drive 
users away, esp for production software.