1) afaik you can't cross compile to arm with dmd. I know it's possible with gdc.

2) There are people who successfully use d without gc. I think andrei posted a stub gc that throws an exception every time the garbage collector is tried to get used. You can't use whole phobos (yet) without gc.

2013/9/2 John Carter <john.carter@taitradio.com>

So I'm a reasonably experienced C/C++/Ruby/... programmer and D is looking very Good to me...

So, time to get serious and sit down and learn it.

Ultimately it won't pay me to learn it unless I can ultimately take my colleagues along.

Currently they are itching to move from C to C++, and I'm trying to convince them not to.

We work in the embedded linux real time area, so here are a few newbie questions that I couldn't spot the answer to...

1) Which D compiler should we start with? We use gcc/g++ for everything else, is gcd a good choice or should we stick with Digital mars one? (We would be cross compiling to sparc or arm)

2) The traditional argument against garbage collected languages in real time environments is that they sporadically lock up while collecting resulting in missed real time deadlines. Certainly the "state of the art" in GC has moved beyond this, and also there are workarounds for the problem. Is it possible to do real time programming in D?

3) A good starter project for me would be to take a well known cpu-intensive C++ template rich project and convert it to D and then present that side-by-side to my colleagues.

I like playing around with CImg, http://cimg.sourceforge.net/

CImg it is one huge template with chunks of macro magic to do image processing.

Before I start, has anyone converted CImg to DImg yet?

Thanks!