Why is D unpopular?

[max haughton]

On Monday, 16 May 2022 at 02:05:32 UTC, forkit wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 May 2022 at 23:32:33 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>
>> An open source community allows (should allow?) individuals to 
>> spend their energy on any topic that they want. Some will work 
>> on ImportC, others (which apparently includes you) will work 
>> on @safe.
>>
>> Ali
>
> My comments are in the context of this thread, about why D is 
> unpopular.
>
> It's not about me wanting to stop people in an open-source 
> community from spending their time on whatever they want.
>
> But I feel ImportC and @safe push D into two completely 
> different directions.
>
> So D may become 'more' popular to those wanting to import more 
> C into their D.
>
> And D may become 'less' popular because more people are 
> importing C into their D.
>
> I'm struggling to see how two different directions get us to... 
> well.. anywhere.

This assumes that both features apply to exactly the same subset 
of all D programs, which they don't.

At Symmetry we have very large D codebases which could be easily 
argued would benefit from both ImportC and @safe given optimal 
implementations of them both.

Most D code does not directly interface with C, but a lot of D 
*projects* do, hence ImportC.

Most D projects also benefit from being able to rely on the 
safety of a given chunk of D code.