You call that a hack? The reason for it was "locality", i.e. it makes it clear what dependencies a function has. Compiling faster was just a side effect.
> five years ago
Is an eternity in the software business.
> five years ago
Is an eternity in the software business.
The location of an import has nothing to do with compilation speed. The only time it would ever make a thing compile faster is if 1) it is local inside a template function, 2) that template is never actually used, AND 3) the module is never imported anywhere else in the program.
That does happen - I use this pattern for optional dependencies which aren't even looked at if not actually used - but it isn't generally the case. You have to actively think about it to fulfill all three requirements.
In those 5 years, D's competition reduced even further the need to actually bother with D, slowly taking away all features that made D special.
If it were a hack, people would only do it for it's hacky-ness rather than as a style preference. The former is simply not true in industrial usage of D. In less words: It's bullshit.
What industrial usage?
A couple of companies that still haven't yet left the community, because each year something new is going to be the Thing to bring everyone into D?
Lets see how D manages to survive when the core team is no longer calling the shots.
What languages don't have something new added on a regular basis? Yes, we improve D consistently and regularly.