I like to start small. I paid students out of my own pocket to help with LFortran and it goes really far, we made excellent progress. Leveraging GSoC. All three of LFortran GSoC students are still contributing. If anybody here is willing to contribute financially, please get in touch with me, I am happy to brainstorm what features we can deliver. I am estimating $50K for a year is all we would need to fully deliver on everything for LFortran to compile production codes. Consequently, even just $1000 gets really far. That assumes the work gets done by hiring students.
The $10M figure is when you want to hire employees at big corporations or national labs, there is typically a large overhead, large salaries etc. That kind of money is not possible to fundraise via crowdfunding. We can discuss that too, but the 1000x smaller figures that we are dealing with in LFortran is something we can do today.
Regarding how to even spend the money on the wider Fortran-lang projects, I don’t think we have an agreement. And that is something we should discuss, and that is why I started the other thread at Fortran goals for 2022, from which this was spun off.
Each of us have a different vision, there are multiple compilers under development, etc. Right now we don’t have a unified vision, and we have a lot of competing interests. That is all right. We already made progress in pulling by the same rope for Fortran-lang. If we can also focus on having a community compiler that we all contribute to, things will go fast very quickly. I personally think the biggest priority is compilers and fpm.