It keeps adding D features anyway, like constexpr.
[0] minimally 2019, 3 years in:
Order-independent top level declarations.
Underscores embedded in integer literals. (I stole this idea from Ada, which had been forgotten. Soon after D popularized it, it became standard in other languages.)
Continue or break to labeled loop.
Fixed sizes for ints, longs, etc.
Of course, I don't know if there's a straight line here, and Zig is welcome to use any features from D that they like. But it's just interesting that things innovated in D pop up in subsequent designs.
Hasn't Java had that since the beginning?
rummaging around in my grammar folder...
BreakStatement ::= "break" [ IDENTIFIER ] ';'
ContinueStatement ::= "continue" [ IDENTIFIER ] ';'
Perl had this years before D even existed [1]. Given its earlier age and higher reach, it's likely that Perl did more to popularize the idea as well.
> Continue or break to labeled loop.
Also a feature that Perl had years before D's existence [2].
These two are the ones I immediately recognized because of my familiarity with Perl, but given the trend, I'm doubtful of the other claims as well now.
[1] https://perldoc.perl.org/5.005/perldata [2] https://perldoc.perl.org/5.005/perlsyn#Loop-Control
I accept that Metaware and Perl did this before D. But I still claim that adoption of it in other languages came shortly after I popularized it in D, as I included it in many presentations about it.
Possibly also taken from Ada, as other text in that section of the manual reference Ada.
See A.3 pg 169 (and 58+) of 235 in: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/metaware/High_C_Language_Reference...
$ a68g --strict -e '(INT a = 1 000; print((a,newline)) )'
+1000
Javascript has had this for functions since 1995. This has been part of zig from the start, not added later.
> Fixed sizes for ints, longs, etc.
this has existed in stdint.h since C99. It doesn't take a genius, only years of pain with C/C++, to realize this is the better way to do things. And also, this was in zig from the start, not added later.
> Underscores embedded in integer literals
Also in zig from the start, not added later. Others have commented on the provenance.
I could be convinced that continue/break to labels was inspired by D.