My wish for 2015...

[Xinok via Digitalmars-d]

I'm going to make a stark proposal to the you all, the community 
and all D users as whole. I wish for us to set an ultimate goal 
to be made top priority and complete by the end of next year. My 
wish is to resolve the issue of memory management for D by the 
end of 2015. This is a significant issue that has affected most 
of us at one point or another. I think this gives D a bad rap 
more than anything else and is a point of contention for many, 
especially those with a background in C/C++.

I think the problem of memory management can be reduced to two 
points:
(1) The garbage collector for D is sub-par.
(2) There are too many implicit allocations in Phobos.

I think three goals need to be met for the problem of memory 
management to be satisfied:
(1) We need a precise garbage collector. The fact that a 
garbage-collected language experiences memory leaks truly 
reflects poorly on on D.
(2) Furthermore, we need to improve the performance of the 
garbage collector. There are some things the developer can do to 
reduce the time and frequency collection cycles, but the current 
situation is far from optimal.
(3) We need a viable alternative to the garbage collection. 
Whether that be allocators, ref counting, or full-fledged manual 
memory management, there is great demand for the ability to use D 
without the GC with little hassle.

I sincerely believe that this is the greatest issue facing D 
today and something that should have been resolved a long time 
ago. The fact that relatively simple programs can crash with 
out-of-memory errors (especially 32-bit executables) and 
high-performance code experiences frequent or lengthy collection 
cycles means we have a bad situation on our hands.

Things like @nogc are a start but much more needs to be done. I'm 
not hoping for an optimal solution, nor am I expecting a 
state-of-the-art garbage collector. I think we should simply aim 
for "good enough". Then once we have a better memory management 
scheme, we can begin incorporating these changes into Phobos.

What do you all think? Can we make improving memory management 
the top priority for 2015 with the goal of developing an adequate 
solution by the end of next year?