Let me echo this: transparency has historically been a big
problem for D. AFAIK, nobody in the broader community was ever
told that the D foundation money would be used to fund a bunch
of Romanian interns, it just happened. In the end, it appears
to have worked out great, but why would anybody donate without
being given transparency on where the money was going in the
first place, when it could have ended badly?
I understand Andrei had connections with that Romanian
university, but some donor might have had connections with a
Brazilian or Chinese university that might have worked out even
better. We'll never explore such connections and alternatives
without transparency.
The current move to fund some IDE work with Opencollective is
better in that regard, but with no concrete details on what it
entails, not significantly better:
https://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
Anyway, I don't use such IDEs, so not a reason for me to donate
anyway.
Honestly, Dmitry's posts starting this thread are incoherent,
I'm not sure what he was trying to say. If he feels D users
should be donating much more, he and others need to make clear
how that money will be spent.
+1
And maybe it would be a good idea to use a Kickstarter-like
philosophy to fund D's development with more transparency.
I mean, you should offer a short panel of D enhancement projects,
with their precise goal, minimum bugdet and investment time limit
(for instance one year to reach the required budget), plus an
ordered list of additional developments if the gathered money
exceeds the initial budget.
People can then invest in the project(s) that interest them the
most.
If the minimum budget is not reached after the time limit, the
investors can get their money back, or decide to invest it in
another project which hasn't expired.
As you guess, in my opinion, two possible fundable projects would
be :
1. a project to add http-related components to D's standard
library
2. a project to allow D to be REALLY usable without GC, i.e. add
weak/strong reference to the language and provide a standard
library which uses them
