How is the D programming language financed?

Thomas Mader thomas.mader at gmail.com
Thu Dec 23 08:41:06 PST 2010


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


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