How to use D for cross platform development?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Bennie Copeland" <mugen.kanosei at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mizfgcnxjpbfbclcsmwo at forum.dlang.org...
> On Sunday, 25 March 2012 at 16:20:51 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
>>
>> About ARM support: That's not strictly true. D on ARM should work fine at 
>> this point in time if you build druntime/phobos in GDC 
>> with -fno-section-anchors (there is even some experimental Android 
>> support). But indeed, no iOS support.
>>
>
> I'm still new at low level programming topics like ABI's etc, so I'll 
> betray my ignorance. Is the druntime only required for providing an 
> interface between the executable and OS resources like IO, or is it 
> inseparable from the language? For example, if I wrote the shell of an iOS 
> app in Obj-C that handled the interface with the phone software/hardware, 
> could the remaining core be written using D? Or is the language 
> capabilities like GC, slicing, mixins, etc. intimately tied to the runtime 
> or phobes?

Some basic things are tied into druntme/phobos. The GC is definitely one of 
them. AIUI, Arrays and AAs have been moving to a druntime-based 
implementation, and the Object class is implemented there.

Technically, you can use D without druntime/phobos. Hell, druntime itself is 
implemented in D. And I've even done it myself ages ago ( 
https://www.semitwist.com/articles/article/view/d-on-gba-nds-progress-thanks-to-oopman ) 
. But you'd be limited to a relatively small C-like subset of the langauge 
(which I'd argue *can* still be worthwhile in cases where C is your only 
other option - like low-power embedded stuff).