[klickverbot]

There are some advantages to having access to a human-readable representation for the symbol name, for example because not every piece of binary tooling out there necessarily also supports reading debug info for the target platform in question.

However, another benefit of this is simply that even if you can hash a huge string down to a fixed length, you still need to construct your huge string in the first place during compilation.

With D generally being quick to compile, by the time your symbol names were in the megabytes, all the string creation and manipulation could take up an appreciable fraction of the total compile time. (No kidding – I was quite surprised to see this show up on the profiles as well.)