Hey guys,

now and then people have asked how to support LDC development. We're a loose bunch of a few devs and not affiliated with the dlang foundation; until now, the only option was to put bounties on issues, with moderate results. The biggest problem IMO is that bigger stuff (AArch64 support, iOS support etc.) is at best vaguely defined, sometimes overlapping and more often than not depends on a number of contributions from different people, incl. foundations laid out in the past by contributors who might not be active anymore, making it hard to establish fairness, as only a single person can claim the bounty. Additionally, Bountysource keeps 10%, and if they were to become insolvent, I guess the bounty would be gone for good.

Maintaining LDC is quite a responsibility, and keeping it up-to-date with the DMD frontend and new LLVM versions, investigating and fixing bugs, implementing new features, managing CI and the release process, trying to answer questions etc. isn't really a sustainable hobby for a single person with a full-time job and only has been over the last years because I don't have a family of my own (yet), haven't been in a relationship and I fortunately don't seem to be very susceptible to burn-out.

So in light of this and as I'm currently looking for a new job, I've decided to try GitHub sponsors, enabling you to sponsor me personally, and see how that goes, potentially affecting the targeted weekly hours for the new job and reserving some time for LDC/dlang development and support. IIUC, GitHub forwards 100% of the monthly amount [still subject to income tax though, which is significant here in Austria].

While backing from individuals would be a welcome token of appreciation, I put my hopes mainly in companies using LDC professionally and having an interest in securing LDC sustainability. I'm open to specific requests/support as well; feel free to contact me via Gitter or drop me a mail at kinke [ät] gmx [döt] net.

Thank you for the attention, and thanks in advance if you decide to take part in this. The sponsor button is live now on https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc.

On Saturday, 29 August 2020 at 00:04:23 UTC, kinke wrote:
> ...

Good luck and I hope you get the funding so that you can develop LDC with as much time as possible. This interesting in another way as well because this also will give us an indication what corporate support the D language really has. Maybe there are plenty of companies out there that silently use D.

On Saturday, 29 August 2020 at 00:04:23 UTC, kinke wrote:
>. isn't really a sustainable hobby for a single person with
> a full-time job and only has been over the last years because I don't have a family of my own (yet), haven't been in a relationship and I fortunately don't seem to be very susceptible to burn-out.

It's absolutely astonishing to me the difference between the value created by contributors to open source and the remuneration for their efforts - I don't just mean pay but the sheer ungrateful experience that it can sometimes seem to be.

So let me express my gratitude personally and on behalf of Symmetry to you, Kai, Iain as well as all the other compiler and library developers whose work we depend on.

I think it's the right thing to do to ask for sponsorship in the way you do.  It's a small point but I personally don't wish to support GitHub as an organisation because I have fundamental differences in values with them but it doesn't matter for this case anyway and pragmatically it's the best way to get started and getting started is what counts.

> So in light of this and as I'm currently looking for a new job,

Well, we are hiring.   Our assets have grown so I now need to hire 40 more developers and most of them can write D.  It's just a matter of trying to raise the average with each hire rather than do what will naturally otherwise occur.  We pay well in the beginning and very well over time.  We have been hybrid for a few years now, fully remote for now since Feb and we are transitioning to remote first.

So if you wanted to come to London, HK or possibly Singapore that could be arranged.  Or if you wanted to be remote then that's fine too.

Of course you may not find it your cup of tea and I would fully respect that in which case of course we would support you via sponsorship - would need to think how much.  But I'd love the chance to discuss opportunities at Symmetry first.  Maybe you could email John Colvin or even Andrei.

I agree that bounties haven't yet got such traction always.  There are a few compiler, druntime and maybe Phobos enhancements that would be valuable to us commercially and it's open to anyone already contributing to get in touch about sponsored work.  Also for dub.

For others we can be very flexible for remote work and we are finally starting to get in shape on the organisational side.  So please contact John Colvin if you would like to be paid for programming in D part-time or full-time, shorter term or indefinite.