Are D classes always garbage collected?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Thursday, 22 December 2011 at 02:29:10 UTC, Froglegs wrote:
> From what I understand D classes are reference types, which 
> would imply to me that they are either always garbage collected 
> or rather less likely, reference counting.

They are garbage-collected.

> Which is fine and all, but since structs don't support virtual 
> functions, doesn't this pretty much force you to use classes 
> and therefor GC if you want virtual functions?

You can allocate classes anywhere, if you're OK with forfeiting 
safety guarantees. For example, see emplace in std.conv:

http://dlang.org/phobos/std_conv.html#emplace

> So why don't structs support virtual funtions? I would like to 
> have a type that is not GC'd or ref counted or any other 
> nonsense, but supports virtual functions..

Value type polymorphism has shown to be problematic. One notable 
problem is object slicing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_slicing

> Am I missing something here? Thanks

I *think* the language allows implementing something akin to 
value type polymorphism (sans syntax sugar), but currently the 
required compiler features (alias this, compile-time 
symbol/address evaluation) are not implemented well-enough to 
test my idea.