[mattnewport]

I had similar thoughts when looking through the slides for Andrei's talk. A main argument in favor of static if over the mechanisms C++ offers to do the same things seems to be familiarity of if statements but having scope not be respected is such an unintuitive difference for anyone with experience in curly braces languages that it seems like a net loss in clarity to me. It looks more like using macros for conditional compilation.

Overuse of if statements is generally something of a code smell and tends to make code harder to follow. To my taste the C++ way of doing things is generally preferable as a result even if more verbose. Given this is probably somewhat a matter of taste it is hard to justify changing C++ to match the D way IMO.