[zyedidia]

I've been using D for OS development and have found it very good for controlling low-level details. GDC is the GCC frontend for D, and has most/all of the same features for controlling this stuff as GCC. For example, you can use `@register("edx") ulong x;` to specify that a variable should be in a particular register, `@section("t1")` on functions to place them in certain sections, and the inline assembler is the same as with GCC. Note: the @register feature is new with GDC 13. See here for the docs: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gdc/.

And of course LDC supports all the LLVM custom attributes, plus GCC-compatible inline assembler (not sure about the "g" constraint though) and LLVM-style inline assembler.

[sparkie]

Thanks for the information. Appears that it does support the section attribute from GCC too. I'll have to explore this a bit and see if I can use it, since it seems to have all or most the features I use.

I did learn D some years ago when the standard library situation was not great, but might be worth looking at again.

[zyedidia]

Depending on how much language support you want, you may want to compile without the D runtime (in which case you only have access to the C standard library, and various features are disabled, such as classes/interfaces, garbage collection, exceptions, and most of the D standard library). You can disable the D runtime in GDC with -fno-druntime and in LDC with -betterC. With those flags, the basic hello world program looks like this:

    import core.stdc.stdio;
    extern (C) void main() {
        printf("Hello world\n");
    }