Newbie questions. Which Compiler to start with? Real Time behaviour? Has anyone converted CImg yet?

[John Carter]

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!