If you had money to place for a bounty, what would you choose?

[CJS]

>
> I wonder what that would do to the existing contributors though?
> I have a suspicion that guys like Kenji and Daniel Murphy 
> already spend
> something close to 'full time' hours on D voluntarily.

An interesting comparison is some of the projects in the 
scientific python ecosystem. Important stuff that a lot of 
scientists, both in academia and industry, use on a daily basis. 
For a long time they've struggled with how to pay coders to deal 
with maintenance/compatibility of important foundational code 
bases. This is a difficult problem since the users are largely 
python programmers but, for example, some of the packages are 
mostly low-level C extension modules with some code generation 
tools (so you need to know C, the C-Python API, and how the 
packages generate C code) and additionally specialized 
open-source libraries in C and Fortran. Other packages are 
friendlier, but to get speed they're still in cython, which 
requires some C knowledge.

I think matplotlib, scikit-learn, ipython, and numpy/scipy get 
the most money/love-and-attention. And each has their own core 
contributor groups and money pools. Recently it's gotten more 
organized with the NumFocus (http://numfocus.org/) non-profit. 
It's an umbrella organization for supporting scientific python 
efforts across the spectrum of available libraries. I'm sure 
anyone who was interested in doing something similar for D could 
ask some of the NumFocus folks how they setup their organization, 
and then the D community could similarly have a focal point for 
gathering funds which could be used for various maintenance and 
enhancements in the D ecosystem.

I think the current state involves a fair amount of funding for 
high contributors, especially student contributors (who are 
usually in need of funds) to take anywhere between a quarter and 
a year to just work on maintenance issues, bug-fixing, and some 
high priority enhancements.