Current state of "D as a better C" (Windows)?

[Jakob Ovrum]

On Sunday, 26 January 2014 at 05:17:35 UTC, Frank Bauer wrote:
> @Adam: thanks for pointing out _d_newclass for me. But for 
> classes I would just simply use custom allocators and 
> deallocators and use new and delete as in C++.

Aye, I don't recommend overloading `new` to mean something else. 
Currently `new` = GC allocation, and code can rely on that. 
Better to have such code break (by not defining _d_newclass) than 
silently leak or worse.

> Leaves dynamic arrays and the rest of Phobos (which parts?) 
> which I have to forego if I don't like GC (but I do like slices 
> so much, not much left for me to slice then ...). And no, 
> anonymous, it's not just reallocating or appending to arrays, 
> every dynamic array is allocated on the GC'd heap from the 
> start.

Huh? You can slice any pointer:

---
T[] allocArray(T)(size_t num)
{
     if (auto chunk = cast(T*)calloc(num, T.sizeof))
         return chunk[0 .. num];
     else
         onOutOfMemoryError();
}
---

As well as fixed-length arrays:

---
char[128] buffer = ...;
auto myStackString = buffer[0 .. len];
---

Slices are plenty useful without GC.