On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 05:29:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>It's fair to consider the result. ImportC elicited more or less no interest from anybody. I expected that. Over time, though, its detractors who have tried it have found it to be a game-changing time saver. ImportC is a huge win for D.
I wouldn't say "no interest". This is what I said:
>This will be incredible. I have a lot of use cases for it. In particular on Windows where linking to DLLs is not fun.
It turns out I was a bit too optimistic. The number of dependencies for the typical C project is huge, including things like glib, so avoiding them isn't usually possible. I also underestimated the widespread use of compiler extensions (thankfully this doesn't seem to be much of a problem any longer for ImportC).
What has worked surprisingly well is converting C headers to D and then using traits to create dynamic bindings at compile time. So while it is not what I originally thought it would be, it's been a win for me in a different way.