Ever wanted to donate? Now you sort-of can by sponsoring me ;)

[kinke]

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.