Just finished watching Andrei's talk, it was up to his usual high
standard.
I found the bits about professionalism a bit weird though: can we
really expect that from a volunteer effort? I'm pretty sure the
A/V guys at the conference weren't volunteers, ie they were paid.
Along the line that QAston started, if you want more
professionalism, is there any interest in producing a commercial
D compiler? If not, why not? I notice that Walter sells C and
C++ compilers and source on digitalmars.com, but strangely not D.
There are interesting business/source models nowadays where you
can be mostly open source and still sell a commercial product.
For example, Walter has often talked about optimizations in the
compiler that he'd like to get to. There could be two compilers:
one where the source is fully publicly available, another made
available to paying users, which has additional optimizations
done either by Walter or others who he supervises, but the source
for those optimizations would not be available publicly, though
perhaps made available only to the buyers under a non-OSS
license. After enough time has passed for the optimization work
to be paid for, the optimization patches would eventually be
merged into the slower, non-paid version. Android uses a similar
hybrid model, which has obviously been enormously successful.
Another possibility is a bounty system, where users pledge money
towards needed features or bug fixes. It'd basically be a more
distributed version of the hybrid approach I've outlined.
I wonder what the response would be to injecting some money and
commercialism into the D ecosystem.
