Why is D unpopular?

[max haughton]

On Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 02:43:31 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 01:57:44 UTC, forkit wrote:
>> Only then will we have sufficient impetus to get off our butts 
>> and do something about our extensive reliance on what is 
>> arguably, the most unsafe language of all -> C.
>
> Actually, C is one of the few languages in use where there are 
> industtial verification solutions...
>
> Anyway, D has always followed C semantics and has always been 
> system level. It never claimed not to be.
>
> People who care a lot about correctness now use Rust, compilers 
> for such languages are implemented in Rust. In that narrow 
> space Rust cannot be displaced in the next 10 years.
>
> Yet, Skia, Z3, LLVM and  other big performance libraries will 
> remain in C in the next 10 years. Nobody wants to rewrite those 
> in other languages. Nobody can afford to build competitive free 
> alternatives. So, C it is!
>
> ImportC done well allows D to benefit from the selfimposed 
> restriction of being C-like that has been there from day 1.
>
> The only way to do it well is to do an integration that drills 
> down to the level of the lexer, parser and AST.

Other than memory safety rust doesn't have all that many virtues 
beyond any other language for guaranteeing correctness.

Ada remains the top dog for properly critical software. SPARK 
still does not have many proper challengers in the space.