[earenndil]

> There is also a bit of schizophrenia going on, with the "new" ideas and the "old" ideas clashing in some places. For example, they claim that you can run D without a GC (the new), but apparently a good chunk of the stdlib requires the GC (the old), so you're stuck.

AFAIK this is somewhat intentional; they don't want to make any hard compatibility breaks, so there's a long deprecation period for any 'old' idea. There's also a lack of manpower to renovate libraries; e.g. there's no good xml library.

Regarding GC, it's IMO not a huge problem. The GC is really not a problem for most applications, and for those where it is, you can simply avoid GC allocations in inner loops (GC only runs when you allocate from it).