C++, D: Dinosaurs?

[Tony]

"Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
news:gep0ej$232$1 at digitalmars.com...
> "Tony" <tonytech08 at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:geogvj$1p5r$2 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>> "Robert Fraser" <fraserofthenight at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:geo5p6$12gk$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> Tony wrote:
>>>> (one HAS to use GC with D, right?)
>>>
>>> No. Well, the compiler generates calls to allocate & free memory, but 
>>> you can replace those calls with whatever you want. See Tango's 
>>> (druntime's) "stub" GC, which just reroutes compiler-generated calls to 
>>> GC methods to malloc() and free(). You can implement your own "GC" or 
>>> whatever management scheme you want (in fact, if you're writing, say, a 
>>> device driver in D, you would want to use a custom allocator like this 
>>> and not the built-in GC).
>>
>> Please clarify for me the mem mgmt of D: is the garbage collector 
>> optional or not?
>
> Yes, it can be ripped out, replaced, whatever. It's slightly hacky, but 
> it's perfectly doable. I did it a few years ago when I was playing around 
> with using GDC with DevKitARM for GBA.
>
> IIRC, you just go into "extern (C) int main(size_t argc, char **argv)" in 
> the internal portion of phobos/tango/druntime or wherever it lives now and 
> comment-out the calls to "gc_init()" and "gc_term()". You might also need 
> to call "gc.disable()" or something (don't really remember). And then if 
> you still want to use "new" and/or "delete" with your own memory manager, 
> you can use D's class allocator and deallocator feature 
> (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/class.html#allocators). I assume you 
> could probably plug those class allocators/deallocators directly into the 
> internal object class if you wanted.
It sounds like a lot of work and new stuff to learn about the 
implementation. Let's face it, I'm not going to use D since it doesn't offer 
me anything over C++ that I want. The main thing I may like about D is that 
it makes the effort to make implementation of the language easier, and that, 
I think, is very key. I am here to look for features I would put in a new 
language, though that may be too large of an endeavor for someone my age.

Tony