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As we are now nearly two months into the new year, I'm becoming both excited and anxious.
I'm excited because some of the ideas and goals I and others have had for D, the community, and the ecosystem, are starting to take shape. I'm eagerly anticipating the announcements I'll be able to make as the year progresses.
I'm anxious because the work needed to be able to make some of those announcements is not trivial. We have a lot to do and, as always, we're faced with limited resources. At the moment, we're learning some skills that we can apply to both organize the resources we do have and pull in more. I'm confident we can make it happen, but it sill feels a bit daunting.
I can't be more specific than that at the moment, but the time that I can start being specific isn't too far away.
For now, I do have a few announcements I can make.
Gripes and wishes
For starters, please keep your gripes and wishes coming in to social@dlang.org. The flood became a trickle and has been quiet for a bit now. I'll post a separate reminder about this at the end of this month, but I plan to keep taking emails on this until the end of March. At the end of March or in early April I'll start organizing everything that people have sent in. I'll publish it for everyone to view and discuss, and we'll start discussing internally what we can and can't achieve, what is and isn't a priority, etc. The more data we have the better, so please keep it coming!
Focusing on stability
As a result of a discussion that took place during our January meeting (summary coming this week!), Walter and Átila have decided to shift gears a bit. For the next year, they want to emphasize stability and robustness.
Generally, that means giving priority to issues deemed fundamental, such as features that aren't working as advertised, or long-standing bugs that detract from the user experience. As a start, Walter has lately been working on circular reference bugs, issues with features like export and .di generation, etc.
Over the coming months, I expect we'll start looking beyond one-off issues from Bugzilla to see how we can tackle more complex problems, like reducing compile times, solving template emission bugs, etc.
This is one area where the gripes lists will come in handy. So again, please keep them coming!
GitHub Sponsors
As of last month, our Flipcause account is no longer active. Most everyone who was supporting us there has already moved over to PayPal or Open Collective. Thanks to all of you who continue to support us.
Now we have a new option. We've finally gotten GitHub Sponsors set up. For now, the tiers are set up to roughly mirror those at Open Collective. That's just a start. We'll look at adjusting all of the tiers across both sites in the coming months. I haven't yet added it to the donate page, but I'll get to it soon.
If you are able to support us, even if it's only a few dollars here and there, please consider doing so when you can. In the coming months, we'll need all the funding we can get in order to carry out much needed change. For example, we're going to ramp up a number of servers to migrate various ecosystem services to Foundation management (the plans are on hold right now, but only for a short while longer), and some of the work that needs doing will have to be done on a contract basis if it's going to get done at all.
As an example, our server bill is only around $50/month right now. That's the server to which Vladimir Panteleev recently migrated the documentation tester for a 50% increase in build times. We should be able to use the same box for some other things, but our server bill is going to increase at some point.
Down the road, I plan to set something up to show our financial flow. But in the meantime, any amount we can stash in the reserves right now will come in handy at a later date. So thanks to any financial support you can give us.
As a reminder, please keep an eye on our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDLanguageFoundation
Now that we're in the YouTube Partner Program, watching, liking, and sharing our videos is one of the easiest ways you can support us.
Frozen DIPs
As of now, the DIP queue is closed to new DIPs.
DIPs that are already in review or that are already in the PR queue can still go forward, but please do not submit any new DIPs for the time being.
The DIP process is getting a long-needed overhaul. Over time, I've had feedback from people who have authored DIPs and those who decided not to. There are a number of different opinions about how things can change, but there are some common themes among them.
I'll write in more detail about this later, but there are a few major goals I have with the overhaul:
- reduce the burden on the author
- reduce the amount of time a submitted DIP is in review
- establish support for fleshing out ideas before a DIP is even written
- establish support for developing initial DIP drafts before they are submitted
Previously, I'd always considered development of the DIP separate from the DIP "process", which I saw as beginning with the submission of a pull request. In reality, the process begins even before an author opens an editor to start typing. I hope that by recognizing that, and by providing support for discussing ideas and writing the DIP, we'll foster an environment that still maintains a relatively high bar for DIPs that get submitted, but also creates a filter such that potential DIP authors can be more confident that they aren't wasting their time once they get to the development stage. By the time they get there, they'll have no doubt if it's an idea worth pursuing.
I expect the freeze to last a few months. I'll be more concrete about dates when I can.
In the meantime, as I have mentioned before, I'm eliminating the Final Review round from the process we have now, and I'm willing to run more than one review at a time. If you have submitted a DIP to the PR queue, I'll be in touch soon to see if you're ready to move forward.
More to come
I intend to publish the January and February meeting summaries by the end of this week. As I mentioned before, I botched my recording of the January meeting (the audio output wasn't recorded, only my microphone was). Given the black hole that is my memory, I had to enlist the help of some of the attendees to gather up enough info for the summary. It won't be at the level of detail you're used to, but it's the best I can do. The recording of the February meeting is fine, so that summary will be normal.
I hope very soon now to finally be able to share some news that I'd agreed to be quiet about for a few weeks. It's the first step we've taken to a new future for the D Language Foundation. We're all very excited by it. I don't know if it will have the same effect in the community at large, but I hope it shows how serious we are about rolling up our sleeves and belatedly adapting to circumstances that have changed and continue to change.
I'll say more about that as soon as I can. I'll close now with a few reminders.
- If you can contribute to a project anywhere in the ecosystem, please do so!
- If you can contribute to the core DLang projects and aren't sure what to do, please contact Razvan or Dennis!
- If you are able to support us financially in any way at all, please do so!
- Blog and tweet about your D projects!
- Share our YouTube videos far and wide!
