Google Summer of Code and the like

[Don]

Gary Whatmore wrote:
> new2d Wrote:
> 
>> Trass3r Wrote:
>>
>>> new2d's recent post made me think about this.
>>> Couldn't we try to get D development sponsored by Google SoC or something  
>>> similar?
>> You should seriously consider if D is the next big language. It's hard to believe D works without major funding. All the other high performance languages and projects are getting multimillion dollar grants. There's also half a dozen books about D, but when I tried to find papers about D from Citeseer, I came back empty handed. Was the conference in the past associated with ACM?
> 
> Probably answering to a troll, but you see D is a pragmatic language. We don't write academic nonsense. All the papers are there on the web. See the Dr Dobbs page and the links in the left bar on digitalmars.com site. See the Bartosz's blog. Agile software development produces very small amounts of document deliverables. What you see is rapid prototyping in action. A single man made an earth shattering new language for serious computing tasks. If we spent all day writing papers, there simply would be no D.
> 
> Later when other co-operative members found the language, a git repository was made for distributed teamwork. There is also a D wiki project. These all provides an equal position to all community members. We could write as much documentation as we want together, but we've chosen developing code instead.
> 
> I don't know about the conference. Took place before I found D. They probably had connections to Amazon. You might find some old (outdated) slides from the web.

Definitely not a troll!
Here's the reality of D: It's a very ambitious language, with a small 
development team. We have no large-scale corporate backing.
We believe we have very strong fundamentals, but the language 
implementation is essentially in an advanced beta stage. The standard 
library is about halfway through the beta stage.
The toolchain is far from maturity.

So, I agree, we need a attract a major sponsor. Until then, we're doing 
the best we can. We've come a very long way in the last year.