[ttkciar]

> Doesn’t D require a GC to achieve the safety guarantees that Rust provides without one

No. The paper covers this. The authors used D's fat pointers, scope, slices, @safe, and ownership/borrowing features to improve code safety.

It is trivial to turn off D's GC, and the authors did not use it in the project described in their paper.

> and many third-party libraries require this GC?

Yes, a lot of D libraries depend on GC, which means they wouldn't be available for use for kernel development.

The D compiler will error out if D code marked with the @nogc attribute depends on GC (or depends on code dependent on the GC), which makes going GCless easier.