Why is D unpopular?

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Monday, 16 May 2022 at 08:08:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/15/2022 11:51 PM, Siarhei Siamashka wrote:
>> Don't these two sentences contradict each other? Unless I'm 
>> misinterpreting the meaning of words "converted" and 
>> "successfully".
>
> It means I have credibility when it comes to this topic.

Which of the two contradicting statements has credibility? Is it 
"not an option to rewrite working C code into D" or "I have 
successfully converted small and medium C code projects to D"?

>> But once the job is done, long term maintenance is relatively 
>> painless.
>
> No, it isn't. I speak from experience. C's limitations makes 
> for code that is brittle (very hard to refactor).

Yes, it is relatively painless. Huge amounts of the existing C 
code developed over the span of decades show us a very different 
picture. Why would you want to refactor something that already 
works fine and needs to keep working fine in the future?

>> Well, everyone is doing this and bindings for popular C 
>> libraries are available for most programming languages.
>
> This vastly underestimates the scope of the problem.

I think that you are exaggerating the problem.

>> Do I understand it right that ImportC is intended for 
>> implementing major new features in the existing old C projects 
>> using D language?
>
> ?

If an old C project is doing its job just fine, then it only 
needs minimal maintenance and has no use for any fancy stuff. Now 
if a major new feature is needed in such an old project, then 
people normally use C (or C++) to implement it. Or if they prefer 
a more convenient nicer higher level language, then maybe they 
embed Lua or Python code to do the job. Is ImportC intended to 
allow using D language as an alternative to Lua/Python for such 
mixed language hybrid projects?