Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 01:57:44 UTC, forkit wrote:
> Only then will we have sufficient impetus to get off our butts 
> and do something about our extensive reliance on what is 
> arguably, the most unsafe language of all -> C.

Actually, C is one of the few languages in use where there are 
industtial verification solutions...

Anyway, D has always followed C semantics and has always been 
system level. It never claimed not to be.

People who care a lot about correctness now use Rust, compilers 
for such languages are implemented in Rust. In that narrow space 
Rust cannot be displaced in the next 10 years.

Yet, Skia, Z3, LLVM and  other big performance libraries will 
remain in C in the next 10 years. Nobody wants to rewrite those 
in other languages. Nobody can afford to build competitive free 
alternatives. So, C it is!

ImportC done well allows D to benefit from the selfimposed 
restriction of being C-like that has been there from day 1.

The only way to do it well is to do an integration that drills 
down to the level of the lexer, parser and AST.