The forked elephant in the room

[bachmeier]

On Tuesday, 30 January 2024 at 13:06:08 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
wrote:

> I certainly thought at the time that importC was a reaction to 
> Zig doing it. I recall vaguely you started work on it after 
> that thread.

It's not full ImportC, but I remember Walter was talking about 
adding C header translation to the compiler [well before 
that](https://forum.dlang.org/post/p59jdq$2ttu$1@digitalmars.com), and apparently it was an old idea by then:

> I have thought about building this into D many times, 
> especially since the Digital Mars C compiler is now available 
> since it is Boost licensed.

I don't think it would have been a big leap from that to 
compiling arbitrary code (the implementation would, but not the 
idea). Jacob Carlborg embedded dstep in the compiler in 2013:

https://forum.dlang.org/post/ks3kir$1ubq$1@digitalmars.com

Note Dicebot's comment:

> While this a relatively common request

All this is to say that the idea was floating around before Zig 
existed. It's the implementation that's important.