Why is D unpopular?

[Adam D Ruppe]

On Friday, 13 May 2022 at 19:18:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> The fact that there are 3 of them suggests shortcomings.

And those shortcomings are...?

The fact there are 3 of them can also be explained by people not 
investigating existing things before doing their own toy or by 
maintainers refusing to work together forcing a fork.

Almost everything you listed here already exist in the 
competition, and what's left could have been done as an automatic 
build integration (even dmd itself just shelling out.... you 
know, like it is doing for the preprocessor now...) instead of a 
whole new compiler.

As I've said several times now, there ARE things importC can 
potentially do that the others can't. But you said in a previous 
message:

> Preprocessor metaprogramming macros will never be directly 
> available to D.

It actually CAN work, through a hygienic mixin.

Oh and from that message?

> htod, dstep, and dpp also will simply ignore metaprogramming 
> macros.

That's not true.

They don't always succeed, but they don't simply ignore them. 
dstep tries to convert some back to D templates and mixins. dpp 
actually tries to apply them to the complete source (usually 
mangling the code in the process, but it does NOT ignore them).