Andrei Alexandrescu:
Walter, Brad, myself, and a couple of others have had a couple of quite exciting ideas regarding code that is configurable to use the GC or alternate resource management strategies.
An alternative design solution is to follow the Java way, leave the D strings as they are, and avoid to make a mess of user D code. Java GC and runtime contain numerous optimizations for the management of strings, like the recently introduced string de-duplication at run-time:
https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/08/string-deduplication-new-feature-java-8-update-20-2 Bye, bearophile
