On Saturday, 30 November 2013 at 15:22:13 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Seeing how much we raised for DConf last year through kickstarter, I
> wonder if it might be possible to use kickstarter to raise funds for
> hiring a team of developers to work full-time on D?

Even as a student, I'd be happy to throw money at D, if someone could give me a good reason to. I really want to see D succeed. I'm just not rich enough to be putting $20 bounties up on (multiple) individual bugs.

I like the idea of a Kickstarter, if it could be done effectively. It would need some planning out.

On Saturday, 30 November 2013 at 23:13:05 UTC, Nick wrote:
> On Saturday, 30 November 2013 at 15:22:13 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> Seeing how much we raised for DConf last year through kickstarter, I
>> wonder if it might be possible to use kickstarter to raise funds for
>> hiring a team of developers to work full-time on D?
>
> Even as a student, I'd be happy to throw money at D, if someone could give me a good reason to. I really want to see D succeed. I'm just not rich enough to be putting $20 bounties up on (multiple) individual bugs.
>
> I like the idea of a Kickstarter, if it could be done effectively. It would need some planning out.

The D decision makers would have to decide what would work best, but setting up a non-profit organisation, and using that to raise funds is the standard model, and is known to work. I can contribute a small amount each month, and I'm sure other D enthusiasts could do the same. 170 sponsors contributing an average of $50 a month would pay for 1 full time developer and $50/hr at 38 hrs/wk.

As for a good reason, the success of D is that reason. As I mentioned in an earlier post, all successful projects (AFAIK) have financial backing, and projects that rely purely on volunteer efforts tend to die of asphyxiation.

Regards
Jason

On 1 December 2013 10:54, Jason den Dulk <public2@jasondendulk.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, 30 November 2013 at 23:13:05 UTC, Nick wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, 30 November 2013 at 15:22:13 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>
>>> Seeing how much we raised for DConf last year through kickstarter, I wonder if it might be possible to use kickstarter to raise funds for hiring a team of developers to work full-time on D?
>>>
>>
>> Even as a student, I'd be happy to throw money at D, if someone could
>> give me a good reason to. I really want to see D succeed. I'm just not rich
>> enough to be putting $20 bounties up on (multiple) individual bugs.
>>
>> I like the idea of a Kickstarter, if it could be done effectively. It would need some planning out.
>>
>
> The D decision makers would have to decide what would work best, but setting up a non-profit organisation, and using that to raise funds is the standard model, and is known to work. I can contribute a small amount each month, and I'm sure other D enthusiasts could do the same. 170 sponsors contributing an average of $50 a month would pay for 1 full time developer and $50/hr at 38 hrs/wk.
>

I wonder what that would do to the existing contributors though?
I have a suspicion that guys like Kenji and Daniel Murphy already spend
something close to 'full time' hours on D voluntarily.

>
> I wonder what that would do to the existing contributors though?
> I have a suspicion that guys like Kenji and Daniel Murphy already spend
> something close to 'full time' hours on D voluntarily.

An interesting comparison is some of the projects in the scientific python ecosystem. Important stuff that a lot of scientists, both in academia and industry, use on a daily basis. For a long time they've struggled with how to pay coders to deal with maintenance/compatibility of important foundational code bases. This is a difficult problem since the users are largely python programmers but, for example, some of the packages are mostly low-level C extension modules with some code generation tools (so you need to know C, the C-Python API, and how the packages generate C code) and additionally specialized open-source libraries in C and Fortran. Other packages are friendlier, but to get speed they're still in cython, which requires some C knowledge.

I think matplotlib, scikit-learn, ipython, and numpy/scipy get the most money/love-and-attention. And each has their own core contributor groups and money pools. Recently it's gotten more organized with the NumFocus (http://numfocus.org/) non-profit. It's an umbrella organization for supporting scientific python efforts across the spectrum of available libraries. I'm sure anyone who was interested in doing something similar for D could ask some of the NumFocus folks how they setup their organization, and then the D community could similarly have a focal point for gathering funds which could be used for various maintenance and enhancements in the D ecosystem.

I think the current state involves a fair amount of funding for high contributors, especially student contributors (who are usually in need of funds) to take anywhere between a quarter and a year to just work on maintenance issues, bug-fixing, and some high priority enhancements.

Re: If you had money to place for a bounty, what would you choose?

Official debian packages for gdc, derelict, gtkd, vibed.

On Dec 1, 2013 8:10 AM, "sclytrack" <sclytrack@fake.com> wrote:
>
>
> Re: If you had money to place for a bounty, what would you choose?
>
> Official debian packages for gdc, derelict, gtkd, vibed.

The gdc packages in Debian are official. :)

Regards
-- 
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';

On 2013-11-29 20:33, Michel Fortin wrote:

> If I were Walter, I wouldn't accept it in the state it is currently in.
> The missing support for the modern runtime makes it look like a gimmick,
> as the legacy runtime is dead end (Apple is already dropping 32-bit
> support with new OS X frameworks). And no ARC makes it look bad compared
> to regular Objective-C. Lacking support for Objective-C categories and
> for blocks is also problematic.

The advantage of having it merged would be to avoid keeping the fork up to date. Although this might risk breaking it, don't know how complete the test suite is.

> I'm no longer working on D/Objective-C. And while Jacob has updated it
> to a more modern incarnation of DMD, it's just the minimum to keep it
> afloat. What this project need is sustained development for I don't know
> how many months.
>
> The implementation is quite good, in my opinion. But then I'm the one
> who wrote it. ;-) The important thing to keep in mind is that this is a
> huge and far reaching changeset. It adds things in the parser, in the
> semantic phase, in code generation, in the back end, and in the runtime.
> It's full of internal design decisions which I didn't really discuss
> much with anyone, in most part because most people here are not familiar
> enough with Objective-C (be it the language, its runtime or its compiled
> representation) to know what to do. There's also some reverse
> engineering work to figure out the correct output for compiled code, as
> this is not much documented.
>
> Honestly, this thing is not mere bounty material, it'd be worthy to be a
> Kickstarter project for about a full year of development time.

This is most likely correct.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 13:44:10 UTC, Manu wrote:
> * ARC
> * rvalue -> ref
> * virtual-by-default
> * GC improvements
> * AA fixes
>
>
> On 29 November 2013 07:01, Fra <Fra@b.it> wrote:
>
>> Personally I would love to see this old issue finally implemented/fixed:
>> There can be only one alias this.
>> https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6083
>>
>> What would your choice be?

I hope virtual-by-default never gets approved. I read DIP51 and quite frankly I am not convinced at all. It is basically "I do not want to put final in front of my methods. Well, I do not want to put virtual in front of my methods... But this is perhaps something for another discussion...

On Thursday, 28 November 2013 at 21:01:39 UTC, Fra wrote:
> Personally I would love to see this old issue finally implemented/fixed:
> There can be only one alias this.
> https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6083
>
> What would your choice be?

1) C++ namespace support
2) AA fixes
3) std.lexer in Phobos.
4) curl out of Phobos. Replaced by std.net.http package would be an extra plus. And yes, I know that curl is more than just a http client, all other supported protocols would go into std.net eventually.

On 2 December 2013 09:33, Dejan Lekic <dejan.lekic@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 13:44:10 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>
>> * ARC
>> * rvalue -> ref
>> * virtual-by-default
>> * GC improvements
>> * AA fixes
>>
>>
>> On 29 November 2013 07:01, Fra <Fra@b.it> wrote:
>>
>>> Personally I would love to see this old issue finally implemented/fixed: There can be only one alias this. https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6083
>>>
>>> What would your choice be?
>
>
> I hope virtual-by-default never gets approved. I read DIP51 and quite frankly I am not convinced at all. It is basically "I do not want to put final in front of my methods. Well, I do not want to put virtual in front of my methods... But this is perhaps something for another discussion...

Come to Dconf 2014 and we'll have another round of talks over beer. :-)