It's a whole-ecosystem issue. There are plenty of built-in features that happen to depend on GC, and while the ways to eliminate GC use are only increasing with

It's a whole-ecosystem issue. There are plenty of built-in features that happen to depend on GC, and while the ways to eliminate GC use are only increasing with time, the "idiomatic D style" is left in doubt when it's so dependent on allocation strategy. Precision choices for performance are characteristic of D - you have a lot of options to type or annotate your code towards a certain envelope of performance, or ignore almost everything and leave it to the GC. So this is not an unfamiliar problem, but it's a point of friction in the same way that borrow-checking poses friction for Rust - the friction may be centered on what you want for your problem domain. If nothing else, you can write C in D, in a roughly similar way to how you can write C in C++ - the features are there, and so are the libraries.