Why is D unpopular?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/13/2022 11:22 AM, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> On Friday, 13 May 2022 at 18:17:06 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> htod, dstep and dpp suggest otherwise.
> 
> What shortcomings did you see in those, and how does ImportC solve them?

The fact that there are 3 of them suggests shortcomings.

ImportC can:

1. handle C constructs that don't have D equivalents, such as bitfields and 
_Generic (yes, I did recently add the bitfields to D).

2. inline C functions

3. do CTFE on C functions

4. D and C source files can be handed to the dmd command line

5. no special syntax for importing C files

6. can be used as a straightforward C compiler

7. import D code (!)

8. minimizes friction in the build system

9. do inline assembler (well, D style inline assembler, not gcc/cl/dmc style)

10. generate linkable libraries from C code

11. make it easy to incrementally convert C code to D

13. make mixing and matching D and C code almost trivial