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

[Mike]

On Saturday, 25 January 2014 at 23:01:12 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
> Setting aside syntax, it's extremely trivial to implement 
> C++-style new/delete as function templates.

I am interested in this.  I am currently using new/destroy.  If 
you know of a way to use templates for this (aside from 
RefCounted and Scoped) please elaborate. It would be quite 
helpful for me.

> The GC is a library implementation with language hooks.

I am implementing a custom runtime and am very interested in this 
as well.  This was the heart of my previous post.  I see that the 
runtime hooks can be used to implement an alternate GC, but do 
you think these hooks could be used to implement a reference 
counted, owned pointer, etc... implementation as an alternative 
to a GC? Are there any currently missing runtime hooks preventing 
such an implementation?

Mike