[EvenThisAcronym]

> As just one anecdote, the mere presence of a GC made me stop looking at D more or less immediately.

That's a shame, because it is extremely easy to write GC-free code in D. One very important fact is that if you don't allocate using the GC (using "new", appending to a slice, etc.), *the GC will never run*. D provides you a ton of tools to make sure that you're not doing GC allocations, and if you are, where in your code they are happening (@nogc, -vgc and even -betterC).