Why is D unpopular?

[Max Samukha]

On Saturday, 30 April 2022 at 17:25:27 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

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

I think Paulo Pinto has given you enough hard evidence. However, 
I was responding to the other of your claims, which is - nobody 
asked for CTFE. I doubt it because the factorial implemented with 
templates is the first thing a new-born C++ programmer sees, and 
her first words are "Template metaprogramming is an abomination. 
Why can't we just evaluate functions at compile time?".

>
>
>> 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.

I also said that CTFE is not so useful in the presence of forward 
reference bugs.

> You couldn't get that code to work in C++, either, because C++ 
> does not allow forward references at all.

Yes, that is one of the reasons why we want to use D and not C++. 
When it doesn't work, the reason goes away.

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

D will prevail!