Why is D unpopular?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/12/2022 6:34 AM, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> C bitfields are useless even in C for hardware work, unless you lock into 
> proprietary compiler, since the layout is undefined.

It's not undefined, it's implementation defined.

Also, the layout of ordinary fields is also implementation defined. C has a lot 
of surprising unportable features.

And if you're interfacing to specific hardware, portability to some other 
platform likely isn't in the cards anyway.

If you use bitfields for, say, reducing the memory consumption of the program, 
it is irrelevant if a different compiler users a different layout. It would only 
be an issue if the bit fields were written to a file, which is not that common.