I'm new in the programming, systems programming especially, but I want to learn D more as a systems programming language and by that I mean avoiding libraries at all. My goal is to write a simple operating system totaly in D (using Assembly wherever is needed) and by progressing in that project, learning this powerfull language as the main systems programming language. Any help/advice on this goal will be really helpful/appreciated. Thanks in advance.

On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 23:38:31 UTC, Goran Petrevski wrote:
> I'm new in the programming, systems programming especially, but I want to learn D more as a systems programming language and by that I mean avoiding libraries at all. My goal is to write a simple operating system totaly in D (using Assembly wherever is needed) and by progressing in that project, learning this powerfull language as the main systems programming language. Any help/advice on this goal will be really helpful/appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Based upon what I've read on the forum:
Try and get a minimal druntime first. Doing so will make you understand what is required to make it work.
You won't have access to the GC so a lot of language features (like slices) are out of the question.

There are some copies of druntime floating about for embedded which will probably help you.

I don't know how easy it would be to get a bootloader to call a D kernel although it has been done.

On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 03:36:30 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> I don't know how easy it would be to get a bootloader to call a D kernel although it has been done.

Pretty easy if you use GRUB. You can just compile a regular linux program with a linker script and load it right up.

My minimal.zip (a bit of a misnomer as it is more than minimal including some experimentation) has some code to run D on bare x86 metal
arsdnet.net/dcode/minimal.zip

On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 03:36:30 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> You won't have access to the GC so a lot of language features (like slices) are out of the question.

Slices are fine, it's just the slice concatenation operators that must be disabled. This is easily accomplished by simply not implementing the runtime functions that support them, thus causing a linker error if used.

On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 23:38:31 UTC, Goran Petrevski wrote:
> I'm new in the programming, systems programming especially, but I want to learn D more as a systems programming language and by that I mean avoiding libraries at all. My goal is to write a simple operating system totaly in D (using Assembly wherever is needed) and by progressing in that project, learning this powerfull language as the main systems programming language. Any help/advice on this goal will be really helpful/appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You might want to look into XOmB: https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb

> You might want to look into XOmB: https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb

Isn't it written in D1? Not sure about that...

On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 00:05:35 UTC, Goran Petrevski wrote:
>> You might want to look into XOmB: https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb
>
> Isn't it written in D1? Not sure about that...

So what if it is written in D1? :) It should not be a big problem to "port" it to D2.
Second interesting project that is kinda related to the topic: https://bitbucket.org/timosi/minlibd .

More: http://wiki.dlang.org/Other_Dev_Tools