Yes, what @milancurcic says is exactly why I am hesitant to pursue this at this time.
We have made great progress since last year, but I feel we might need another year. These things do iron themselves out over time, as we get more GSoC years behind us, more track record with students, more time to align ourselves with the goals, etc.
To give an example of the challenges: I would of course like to use such funds for LFortran. But what about GFortran and Flang, and what about the commercial compilers? They would all want to use such funds as well. We currently don’t have agreements in the community what tools we should use and prioritize. But as I said above, we have made great progress since last year, and have better answers than we did, but we need to make more progress on this.
Here is one idea out of this: we can encourage each “sub-project” to accept funding, then people can decide what they want to fund. And we already do. Here is how you can donate to the main three open source compilers:
- GFortran: via FSF? Ways to donate to the FSF — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software
- Flang/LLVM: Sponsors | LLVM Foundation
- LFortran: Donate for LFortran