Signed word lengths and indexes

[Don]

bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
> 
>>> But I can say that D is already not the best language
>>> to develop non-toy operating systems.
>> Why?
> 
> This is partially off-topic to the topic of this thread.
> 
> I have not written an OS yet, so I can't be sure. But from what I have read and seen D seems designed for different purposes, mostly as a high-performance low-level application language that currently is programmed in a style that doesn't assume a very efficient GC.
> 
> D has many features that are useless or negative if you want to write code close to the metal as a kernel

Indeed, only a subset of D is useful for low-level development. But D 
has more close-to-the-metal features than C does.
(Compare with C++, which didn't improve the machine model it inherited 
from C).

Of course, the market for kernel development is so small and so 
dominated by C that it's not really worth worrying it.