Why is D unpopular?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/11/2022 5:53 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> The main hurdle of ImportC that makes it not as attractive as it could
> be, is the lack of an integrated C preprocessor. Meaning, I have to
> manually invoke the C preprocessor before ImportC is useful.

I know. dmd now invokes cpp automatically for Posix systems, cl /P for Windows 
coff. A PR invokes sppn for Win32 omf builds, it's all green:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/14090


> That pretty
> much nullifies the value of ImportC: I might as well just translate the
> C prototypes myself and it'd be less troublesome.

Wouldn't adding a make rule to run the preprocessor be just a couple lines of make?


> If ImportC were to
> reach the point where I can literally just import any system C header,
> *without* needing to run the preprocessor myself beforehand, *that*
> would make ImportC immensely more useful in terms of C integration.

I agree. Now, if only someone would approve 14090, we'd be good to go!