Memory Management
=================

D use garbage collection for heap allocated data by default.
This provides a safe default
and you can program without memory worries like in Java.

.. warning::

   Since you are reading this tutorial,
   you are obviously not an experienced D programmer.
   **Just use the garbage collector!**
   The rest of this section is only provided
   to show possibilities.

Garbage Collector Tuning
-------------------------

However, (after careful profiling!) you might find the garbage collector to be the bottleneck.
In this case D provides various ways to fix this.

You could avoid allocation in the hot spots of your code.
This is probably a good idea,
no matter what kind of memory management you use.

You can disable garbage collection temporarily.

.. code-block:: d

    std.gc.disable()
    // no garbage collection in here, only allocation
    std.gc.enable()

The reverse solution would be to adapt the garbage collector to the application.
D allows to replace the garbage collector by the application
to optimize for specific scenarios.
The current garbage collector is not as good as e.g. the Hotspot JVMs.

Manual Memory Management
------------------------

If all those approaches do not help,
you can use still use manual memory management.
However, most of the standard library requires garbage collection.

There is ``delete`` for manual deallocation.
You could also access ``malloc`` and ``free`` from libc directly
and thus circumvent the garbage collector.
D provides all mechanisms for RAII like C++.
There is no compiler/language support for Reference Counting.

.. seealso::
   http://dlang.org/memory.html