I would be interested in how the D programming language is financed as a project?
As it seems the core projects at the moment are dmd, druntime and phobos.
All of these are in a very active state with multiple contributors when judging the revision logs.

I guess many of these contributors are volunteers but are there also people who get somehow money for their work?

It's conceivable that Andrei, Walter and others get money for talks they give but is there anybody who can work on D fulltime without the need to do a daytime job beside it?

I know that Andrei works as a research scientist for Facebook but how do other main contributors get their money?

I wonder how people can manage to work on a fulltime job and on D.

Who pays the needed infrastructure?

Thomas

On 23/12/10 22:06, Thomas Mader wrote:
> I would be interested in how the D programming language is financed as a
> project?
> As it seems the core projects at the moment are dmd, druntime and phobos.
> All of these are in a very active state with multiple contributors when
> judging the revision logs.
>
> I guess many of these contributors are volunteers but are there also
> people who get somehow money for their work?
>
> It's conceivable that Andrei, Walter and others get money for talks they
> give but is there anybody who can work on D fulltime without the need to
> do a daytime job beside it?
>
> I know that Andrei works as a research scientist for Facebook but how do
> other main contributors get their money?
>
> I wonder how people can manage to work on a fulltime job and on D.
>
> Who pays the needed infrastructure?
>
> Thomas

Hi Thomas,

You could give some credence to your post that you are simply not trolling by first posting a reasonable D language question on D.learn.

Cheers
Justin

Am 2010-12-23 13:57, schrieb Justin Johansson:
> On 23/12/10 22:06, Thomas Mader wrote:
>> I would be interested in how the D programming language is financed as a
>> project?
>> As it seems the core projects at the moment are dmd, druntime and phobos.
>> All of these are in a very active state with multiple contributors when
>> judging the revision logs.
>>
>> I guess many of these contributors are volunteers but are there also
>> people who get somehow money for their work?
>>
>> It's conceivable that Andrei, Walter and others get money for talks they
>> give but is there anybody who can work on D fulltime without the need to
>> do a daytime job beside it?
>>
>> I know that Andrei works as a research scientist for Facebook but how do
>> other main contributors get their money?
>>
>> I wonder how people can manage to work on a fulltime job and on D.
>>
>> Who pays the needed infrastructure?
>>
>> Thomas
>
> Hi Thomas,
>
> You could give some credence to your post that you are simply not
> trolling by first posting a reasonable D language question on D.learn.
>
> Cheers
> Justin

Well after reading through my post again I must admit that it can be misunderstood in that direction.
But trolling is clearly not my intention.

Maybe it helps if I write more about my background with D.
I wrote two apps with D 1 (Sudoku with GtkD and a ping utility for pinging thousands of randomly generated IPs).
After that I lost D out of my focus because everything seemed to be dead or dying.
This summer I got interested in D again because of "The D Programming language" book and realized that the development of the core D projects occur in a much more open way and afaik more people working on it than before.
This was a major improvement over the days were I lost my focus and it was also one of the biggest complaints about the future for D discussions.

As it is now I still think that D is a very nice language and the project took many important hurdles over the time.
But I tracked many open source projects over the years and realized that projects without paid developers are unstable and can easily die.
Since this stability is a major decision criterion for choosing a programming language for everybody and even more important for companies I would be very interested in it.

I think it's very important for D to step into the corporate world to get more stability, a bigger community and therefore a stronger toolchain.
For this to happen companies need trust in the future of the project and the future are the people and the infrastructure behind D.
If that is all on a solid foundation and communicate this foundation to the community it will be a big win.

Thomas

Thomas Mader wrote:
> I guess many of these contributors are volunteers but
> are there also people who get somehow money for their work?

Yup. I use D almost exclusively in my professional work, and if something bugs me in the course of that, I fix it, and if applicable, submit the fix back upstream. Failing that, I put generally useful files on my server for public download.

There's a variety of other little things that follow this same pattern: they are useful to my business, so I do them for personal profit, but they are useful to other people too so I make it public.

On 12/23/2010 7:57 AM, Justin Johansson wrote:
> On 23/12/10 22:06, Thomas Mader wrote:
>> I would be interested in how the D programming language is financed as a
>> project?
>> As it seems the core projects at the moment are dmd, druntime and phobos.
>> All of these are in a very active state with multiple contributors when
>> judging the revision logs.
>>
>> I guess many of these contributors are volunteers but are there also
>> people who get somehow money for their work?
>>
>> It's conceivable that Andrei, Walter and others get money for talks they
>> give but is there anybody who can work on D fulltime without the need to
>> do a daytime job beside it?
>>
>> I know that Andrei works as a research scientist for Facebook but how do
>> other main contributors get their money?
>>
>> I wonder how people can manage to work on a fulltime job and on D.
>>
>> Who pays the needed infrastructure?
>>
>> Thomas
>
> Hi Thomas,
>
> You could give some credence to your post that you are simply not
> trolling by first posting a reasonable D language question on D.learn.
>
> Cheers
> Justin

I thought his tone seemed genuine enough.

On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:41:06 +0100
Thomas Mader <thomas.mader@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it's very important for D to step into the corporate world to
> get more stability, a bigger community and therefore a stronger toolchain.
> For this to happen companies need trust in the future of the project and
> the future are the people and the infrastructure behind D.

This is true, but having important corporate investment would also strongly freeze the language in a premature state. It's too early (for D2).

Denis
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
vit esse estrany ☣

spir.wikidot.com

Am 2010-12-23 21:01, schrieb spir:
> On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:41:06 +0100
> Thomas Mader<thomas.mader@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> I think it's very important for D to step into the corporate world to
>> get more stability, a bigger community and therefore a stronger toolchain.
>> For this to happen companies need trust in the future of the project and
>> the future are the people and the infrastructure behind D.
>
> This is true, but having important corporate investment would also strongly freeze the language in a premature state. It's too early (for D2).
>
> Denis
> -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> vit esse estrany ☣
>
> spir.wikidot.com
>

I agree but I must confess that I'm confused about the state of D2.
It's said that for new projects someone should use D2 but I often recognize that it is not considered ready/finished yet. On the other hand I also read somewhere that with the release of the book "The D programming language" D2 is finalized?

Can somebody please enlighten me on this?

Thomas

On Thursday 23 December 2010 12:43:11 Thomas Mader wrote:
> Am 2010-12-23 21:01, schrieb spir:
> > On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:41:06 +0100
> > 
> > Thomas Mader<thomas.mader@gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> I think it's very important for D to step into the corporate world to get more stability, a bigger community and therefore a stronger toolchain. For this to happen companies need trust in the future of the project and the future are the people and the infrastructure behind D.
> > 
> > This is true, but having important corporate investment would also strongly freeze the language in a premature state. It's too early (for D2).
> > 
> > Denis
> > -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> > vit esse estrany ☣
> > 
> > spir.wikidot.com
> 
> I agree but I must confess that I'm confused about the state of D2. It's said that for new projects someone should use D2 but I often recognize that it is not considered ready/finished yet. On the other hand I also read somewhere that with the release of the book "The D programming language" D2 is finalized?
> 
> Can somebody please enlighten me on this?

With the release of TDPL, the D spec is no longer undergoing massive changes with each release. It is mostly finalized. However, there have been some issues that have come up or which were not 100% sorted out prior to TDPL being released, so some changes to the spec may be made. They will, however, only be made as necessary, and there shouldn't be very many of them. Also, they'd mostly deal with fancier features such as inout or alias this.

That being said, regardless of the state of the spec, there's the state of the compiler and the standard libraries. The compiler continues to progress, but it has plenty of bugs in it still, and it has yet to implement everything in TDPL (e.g. you can currently only have one alias this per class or struct instead of multiple like TDPL says), though it has implemented almost all of it. The compiler is stable enough that you should be able to write code in it - even for larger projects - just fine. But you will run into bugs. So, if you want rock- solid stability, then it's not up-to-snuff yet. But it works quite well overall, and many consider the benefits to far outweigh the problems. And the compiler continues to improve with each release, so the number of problems is diminishing.

Phobos, however, continues to be in flux and is definitely not finalized. Much of it is pretty fixed and won't be undergoing major changes, but other parts will continue to change as development continues. Some modules will be removed (though not many) and others will be added. The release of TDPL did not indicate the finalization of Phobos at all. Phobos is very much still a work in progress. So, while you can mostly rely on it not changing enough to force you to change code with a new compiler release, it definitely does happen at least some of the time.

So, D2 is definitely ready for use, but it's still rough around the edges. Whether it's appropriate or not far a particular project likely depends on how mission critical the project is.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:43:11 -0500, Thomas Mader <thomas.mader@gmail.com> wrote:

> Am 2010-12-23 21:01, schrieb spir:
>> On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:41:06 +0100
>> Thomas Mader<thomas.mader@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> I think it's very important for D to step into the corporate world to
>>> get more stability, a bigger community and therefore a stronger toolchain.
>>> For this to happen companies need trust in the future of the project and
>>> the future are the people and the infrastructure behind D.
>>
>> This is true, but having important corporate investment would also strongly freeze the language in a premature state. It's too early (for D2).
>>
>> Denis
>> -- -- -- -- -- -- --
>> vit esse estrany ☣
>>
>> spir.wikidot.com
>>
>
> I agree but I must confess that I'm confused about the state of D2.
> It's said that for new projects someone should use D2 but I often recognize that it is not considered ready/finished yet. On the other hand I also read somewhere that with the release of the book "The D programming language" D2 is finalized?

The book describes the concepts that D2 will implement.  In that respect, TDPL's word is final (mostly).  It does not mean the reference compiler properly implements those concepts.  There are still several concepts (alias this and inout come to mind) which are not implemented well at all.

In particular, the book makes very little mention of Phobos, which is still being changed profusely.

I'd say D2 is good enough for toy projects, and if you find bugs, they can help us make it better.  But if you want to make a serious large project and don't want to deal with instability, I'd recommend using D1, but you may find D1 Phobos quite lacking.  I can't really recommend Tango due to possible taint issues, but you may find that an acceptable alternative.

-Steve

On 12/23/10 3:21 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:43:11 -0500, Thomas Mader
> <thomas.mader@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Am 2010-12-23 21:01, schrieb spir:
>>> On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:41:06 +0100
>>> Thomas Mader<thomas.mader@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think it's very important for D to step into the corporate world to
>>>> get more stability, a bigger community and therefore a stronger
>>>> toolchain.
>>>> For this to happen companies need trust in the future of the project
>>>> and
>>>> the future are the people and the infrastructure behind D.
>>>
>>> This is true, but having important corporate investment would also
>>> strongly freeze the language in a premature state. It's too early
>>> (for D2).
>>>
>>> Denis
>>> -- -- -- -- -- -- --
>>> vit esse estrany ☣
>>>
>>> spir.wikidot.com
>>>
>>
>> I agree but I must confess that I'm confused about the state of D2.
>> It's said that for new projects someone should use D2 but I often
>> recognize that it is not considered ready/finished yet. On the other
>> hand I also read somewhere that with the release of the book "The D
>> programming language" D2 is finalized?
>
> The book describes the concepts that D2 will implement. In that respect,
> TDPL's word is final (mostly). It does not mean the reference compiler
> properly implements those concepts. There are still several concepts
> (alias this and inout come to mind) which are not implemented well at all.
>
> In particular, the book makes very little mention of Phobos, which is
> still being changed profusely.
>
> I'd say D2 is good enough for toy projects, and if you find bugs, they
> can help us make it better. But if you want to make a serious large
> project and don't want to deal with instability, I'd recommend using D1,
> but you may find D1 Phobos quite lacking. I can't really recommend Tango
> due to possible taint issues, but you may find that an acceptable
> alternative.

I wonder how stable D2 is when used as a "better D1", i.e. making conservative use of new features. I think the bread and butter support is as rock solid in both languages.

Andrei