Why is D unpopular?

[Araq]

On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 01:33:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/2/2021 11:48 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Then on the PC and Mac it quickly got the love from Apple 
>> (replacing Object Pascal with C++), IBM, Microsoft, Borland, 
>> Watcom,  SGI, Sun, HP, among others, and naturally Digital 
>> Mars/Symantec as well.
>
> Um, Zortech C++ was the first native C++ compiler on DOS in 
> 1987. (The existing ones were all cfront based, and were 
> terribly slow.)

 From D&E:

"The size of this overhead depends critically on the time needed 
to read and write the intermediate C representation and that 
primarily depends on the disc read/write strat- egy of a system. 
Over the years I have measured this overhead on various systems 
and found it to be between 25% and 100% of the "necessary" parts 
of a compilation. I have also seen C++ compilers that didn't use 
intermediate C yet were slower than Cfront plus a C compiler."

That's not "terribly slow". And before you bring up "templates 
are slow to compile", in 1987 cfront did not have templates.

"The earliest implementation of templates that was integrated 
into a compiler was a version of Cfront that supported class 
templates (only) written by Sam Haradhvala at Object Design Inc. 
in 1989."


> ZTC++ produced the first boom in use of C++, accounting for 
> perhaps 90% of C++ use.
>
> This popularity lead to Borland dumping their own OOP C and 
> going with C++, which then led to Microsoft getting on the 
> bandwagon.
>
> This popularity then fed back into the Unix systems.
>
> No, you won't find this account in the D&E of C++ histories, 
> but it's what actually happened.

Well that's the history as you remember it and Stroustrup does 
list "1st Zortech C++ release" in June 1988. I cannot say if your 
"90%" figure is correct or not.