Why is D unpopular?

[John Colvin]

On Saturday, 30 April 2022 at 07:35:29 UTC, 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!". 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 don’t know what your threshold for “marginally useful” is, but 
ctfe is proving its usefulness at Symmetry Investments every day. 
Not as a niche feature, as a “wherever we need it, all over the 
place” feature.