My two cents

[jmh530]

On Friday, 20 October 2017 at 19:18:15 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>
> Interesting proposals, but IMHO, the only ESSENTIAL feature 
> missing in D is the possibility to program in D using a 
> built-in reference-counting based variant of the standard 
> library.
>

Look at the goals for H2 2017
https://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2017H2
The top three things: 1) @safety, 2) @nogc, 3) betterC. Under #2, 
it specifically says safe reference counting. It's getting worked 
on...