Increasing performance with static polymorphism (and other neat tricks) in D
atilanevesoncode.wordpress.com
atilanevesoncode.wordpress.com
/*
* A destructor is not used, because that would make it not POD
* (Plain Old Data) and it could not be placed in registers.
*
*/
Strangely enough I had to implement something similar in C++ very recently. I went with a solution that uses alloca if the size is lower than some limit, else falls back to new. I was torn between whether to allocate an array statically or use alloca, eventually went with alloca although that is usually frowned upon. I expected this function to be called from multiple threads not all of which would need to allocate space, using an array on stack would have wasted space.
Wish C++ committee approved the proposal to have variable sized arrays like the ones C has now.
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_traits#hasElaborateDestructor
I believe this is what you're looking for. Mayhap you need to combine it with hasElaborateCopyConstructor and/or other functions in std.traits.
hasElaborateDestructor( )
EDIT: To clarify, one could have two versions one with a destructor for non POD and the current one. The compiler dispatches to the appropriate one at compile time.