Why is D unpopular?

[max haughton]

On Wednesday, 18 May 2022 at 19:36:32 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 07:26:28PM +0000, max haughton via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 18 May 2022 at 19:20:58 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> > On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 07:08:59PM +0000, max haughton via 
>> > Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> > > > [...]
>> > [...]
>> > > [...]
>> > 
>> > What nasty changes are there?
> [...]
>> You'll have to ask Iain and Martin since they are on the front 
>> lines but it is very easy to break the C++ interface to the 
>> compiler if you so wish.
>
> Ah I got it, we have to preserve the C++ interface in order to 
> integrate with the LLVM/GCC backends, right?
>
> In that case, if I were put in the same situation, I'd 
> auto-generate a .di from the C++ .h instead.  Basically, I'm 
> wary of maintaining two parallel versions of the same thing, 
> because the chances of human error causing them to go out of 
> sync is just too high.  Let the machine do what it's best at; 
> leave the human to do what humans are good at, which is NOT 
> repetitive tasks that require high accuracy.
>
>
> T
I think you have it backwards.

GCC and LDC both use the D frontend sources, but their glue code 
is written in C++. This means that they need C++ binding s *to* 
the frontend. A .di file would be pointless because there would 
be no one to consume it.