Rob T:
I wonder what can be done to allow a programmer to go fully manual, while not loosing any of the nice features of D?
Even the Rust language, that has a more powerful type system than D, with region analysis and more, sometimes needs localized reference counting (or a localized per-thread GC) to allow the usage of its full features. So I don't think you can have all the nice features of D without its GC.
I believe the D design has bet too much on its (not precise) GC. Now the design of Phobos & D needs to show more love for stack allocations (see Variable Length arrays, array literals, etc), for some alternative allocators like reaps (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.7.6505 ), and so on. Someone implemented a stack-like data manager for D, but the voting didn't allow it into Phobos.
Bye, bearophile
