D and a bazillion of small objects

[Yao G.]

Hello everybody.

What's the best practice or more efficient way to deal, in D, with lots of  
small objects? My problem is this: I have a small control, ListView. This  
control can have hundreds (and theoretically thousands) of items  
(ListViewItem instances, to be precise). And, in turn each one of this  
ListViewItems can own sub-items (ListViewSubItem instances), effectively  
creating an humongous quantity of small objects.

Should I just go and create all of those items as classes? I have the  
feeling that this not very efficient (a lot of small heap allocations).  
There's also the possibility of make them structs. But then I would have  
the issue of passing value objects in methods and losing whatever change I  
made (because I would be modifying a copy of the original). To solve this  
I could make an internal, Impl structure, and then use reference counting  
to manage the copies and to make effective all the item modification  
across all copies. But then I would be where I started: doing tons of heap  
allocations.

So, how should I deal with this issue?

Thanks.

Yao G.