Why is D unpopular?

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 00:50:53 UTC, max haughton wrote:
> On Monday, 16 May 2022 at 22:35:00 UTC, forkit wrote:
>> Just imagine Rust/Go implementing a C compiler inside their 
>> own compiler They'd be laughing stock (not because it's wrong 
>> or silly, but because they took the initiative to step further 
>> awat from C, not further towards it).
>
> https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen
>
> It's not built in to the compiler but it's officially supported 
> by the Rust foundation.

Well, this looks like one of the automated bindings generators. 
Many of these exist for various languages since a very long time 
ago. The problem of creating bindings to the existing popular C 
and even C++ libraries in order to use them from the other 
programming languages is not new. Numerous solutions for this 
problem are also not new. I think that https://www.swig.org/ 
existed since like forever and D is even listed as one of the 
supported languages.

In my earlier comment I also mentioned the hybrid projects, which 
are mixing multiple programming languages in the same codebase to 
leverage their advantages (C for the performance critical parts 
and Lua/Python for convenience/safety in the other parts).

Walter is very much hyped about ImportC. But his solution needs 
to be objectively compared to the other existing solutions, 
rather than pretending that it's a unique groundbreaking 
innovation which will finally make D language popular.