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.
