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Asked: 2026-06-14T19:13:34+00:00

I’m thinking about learning D (basically C++ done right and with garbage collection and

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I’m thinking about learning D (basically “C++ done right and with garbage collection and message passing between threads”) and talked to a colleague who’s been long-time C++ programmer and basically he complained that the garbage collector as such has severe timing issues even in soft realtime type applications.

It’s not that I need to write realtime app – far from it – but I’m curious how problematic GC would be in developing, say, database? (abstracting from additional memory usage overhead that GC seems to impose, statistically)

(now I know that GC can be turned off in D but that’s like saying you can get rid of problems related to a car by getting rid of a car – true but that’s not the solution I’d like to choose)

Is this true? How severe are such issues in practice? Is developing, say, a device driver in D and with use of GC is practical/sensible/good practice?

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  1. Editorial Team

    While D has a GC, it does not force you to use it for everything. D also has structs, which act like C++ classes&structs(minus the polymorphism).

    In modern managed languages, the GC is not a problem as long as you have enough memory. This is also true for unmanaged languages like C++ – but in C++, running out of memory means you can’t allocate any more memory, while in Java running out of memory means a delay while the GC kicks in.

    So, if you are planning to allocate tons of objects then yes – the GC can be a problem. But you probably don’t really need to allocate so many objects. In Java, you have to use objects to store things like strings and dates and coordinates – and that can really fill up your heap and invoke the GC(luckily, modern JVM use generational GC to optimize those types of objects). In D, you’ll just use structs for these things, and only use classes for cases that actually require GC.

    As a rule of thumb, you’ll usually want to use structs wherever you can, but if you find yourself doing something special to take care of deallocating or to prevent copying&destructing(though it’s really fast in D) – make that type a class without a second thought.

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