Re GC, it is most definitely not being removed. Dependance on it is being reduced (with @nogc) and if you don't allocate from it, it will never trigger.
It was recently made multithreaded for the mark phase (sweep is still single threaded), which for large heap small garbage has made it significantly faster.
There are also fork-based GC's available for linux where the mark and sweep are done by a separate process.
The GC is stop the world so if you care about latency the default is not so great, but there are plenty of groups using D for hard realtime systems with either no use of the GC or the fork based one. Speed wise the default is not too bad.
It was recently made multithreaded for the mark phase (sweep is still single threaded), which for large heap small garbage has made it significantly faster.
There are also fork-based GC's available for linux where the mark and sweep are done by a separate process.
The GC is stop the world so if you care about latency the default is not so great, but there are plenty of groups using D for hard realtime systems with either no use of the GC or the fork based one. Speed wise the default is not too bad.