The forked elephant in the room

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 05:29:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

> It's fair to consider the result. ImportC elicited more or less 
> no interest from anybody. I expected that. Over time, though, 
> its detractors who have tried it have found it to be a 
> game-changing time saver. ImportC is a huge win for D.

I wouldn't say "no interest". This is [what I 
said](https://forum.dlang.org/post/apozoxpxalpdqiysoqak@forum.dlang.org):

> This will be incredible. I have a lot of use cases for it. In 
> particular on Windows where linking to DLLs is not fun.

It turns out I was a bit too optimistic. The number of 
dependencies for the typical C project is huge, including things 
like glib, so avoiding them isn't usually possible. I also 
underestimated the widespread use of compiler extensions 
(thankfully this doesn't seem to be much of a problem any longer 
for ImportC).

What has worked surprisingly well is converting C headers to D 
and then using traits to create dynamic bindings at compile time. 
So while it is not what I originally thought it would be, it's 
been a win for me in a different way.