Smart pointers instead of GC?

[Frustrated]

On Monday, 3 February 2014 at 20:02:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> On 2/3/14, 6:57 AM, Frank Bauer wrote:
>> Anyone asking for the addition of ARC or owning pointers to D, 
>> gets
>> pretty much ignored. The topic is "Smart pointers instead of 
>> GC?",
>> remember? People here seem to be more interested in diverting 
>> to
>> nullable, scope and GC optimization. Telling, indeed.
>
> I thought I made it clear that GC avoidance (which includes 
> considering built-in reference counting) is a major focus of 
> 2014.
>
> Andrei

I hope the same mistakes are not repeated of the past:

This means that whatever is chosen, removing the hard dependence
on any automatic memory management should be avoided.

It would be nice to be able have D work in all areas of
programming. I think allowing one to turn off all automatic
memory management, or even allowing one to choose which
allocation method to use per function/class/module get about
99.99 of the use cases. You allow people that want the freedom of
now worrying about deallocation to use the AGC and those that
need every drop of performance can go the manual route.

Maybe such a general approach is difficult to implement? But
surely it would be worth it. From this thread, it's obvious that
there are plenty of people interested in its success.

Getting D runtime off any specific memory allocation scheme would
seem to be the priority? Then Phobos? then we party like it's
1999?

It would be nice if one could simply write some allocator, drop
it into D, and everything work out dandy. e.g., I want to try out
a new super fast AGC like metronome GC, I write the code for it,
tell D to use it, and then reap the benefits.