You can use D's betterC mode, supported by the compilers. This avoids the D runtime entirely, there are no classes, exceptions, etc. You can still use templates

You can use D's betterC mode, supported by the compilers. This avoids the D runtime entirely, there are no classes, exceptions, etc. You can still use templates and CTFE if you like (which can be awesome), but there's nothing forcing you to do that. You can just copypaste some C code, make a few syntactic changes to get it to compile and get a decent level of safety that way.