Why is D unpopular?

[arco]

On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 23:13:34 UTC, Adam Ruppe wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 23:08:54 UTC, arco wrote:
>> This first one is historic: for a long time, D was not open 
>> source
>
> This is not true. Really persistent myth but easy to prove that 
> it was GPL'd as early as 2002. gdc's predecessor was out by 
> 2003, also GPL licensed.

But at what point did D become truly usable using open source 
compilers? GDC was only declared feature complete, supported and 
merged upstream in GCC 9.0, that is in 2019. Both Go and Rust 
came with open source, production quality, reference compilers 
since day 1. It really makes a difference.

Have you got some information about the early GPL'd compiler? My 
understanding is that DMD only became open source some time 
around 2014, was there another early project?