[Haskell-cafe] GHC devs

[Andrew Coppin]

Don Stewart wrote:
> bulat.ziganshin:
>   
>> Hello Andrew,
>>
>> Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 10:28:45 PM, you wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I had always *assumed* that there was something like a hundred core
>>> developers
>>>       
>> only 10 and only in binary system :)))
>>
>>     
>
> About 1000 people have worked on libraries on Hackage. That's about two
> orders of magnitude more than work on GHC.
>   

Sure. But libraries are more or less self-contained, generally. GHC is 
one giant system of closely interacting components, so it (presumably?) 
takes about two orders of magnitude more cooperation to work on it. ;-)

Still, if there are only 10 core people actively working on it... well 
that explains why the wishlist is always so much longer than the feature 
list. (Not that GHC doesn't already _have_ some pretty cool features, 
mind you...)

Does anybody actually "get paid" to develop GHC? Or is this all people 
working on it in their spare time? It would seem like pushing such a 
huge piece of software forward at anything more than glacial pace would 
require quite a lot of manpower (which I guess is why I assumed there 
were a lot of people working on it). For that matter, who pays for the 
servers which host the code repos and so forth?