I really empathize with the community interaction aspects of these comments - having spent a few months triaging everything that comes into our (admittedly less

I really empathize with the community interaction aspects of these comments - having spent a few months triaging everything that comes into our (admittedly less organized) repo, I can very much understand. It can be truly draining to only see the negatives and the nits and the nags and the bugs and the bothers and the badgers of a product. Heck, it makes it easy to forget about all the people who love it, those who've never once complained and silently continue about their business, able to ignore the fact that work had ever been done (and continues to be done). But... It's swell when you meet someone and they offhandedly mention using the thing you work on, heck, even recommend it or straight up take it for granted. I know those moments probably can't sustain open source maintainers (and that leads into the second point about capturing funding), but, at least in my experience, they really help keep a more healthily balanced perspective. And that's at least a part of being able to stay happy working on such a project. With respect to funding... As a relatively young compiler dev, I've pretty much always taken compiler software for granted. It's (almost) always been that languages have been freely available, and usually the source available, too. If I'm honest, at the price point of "free", it's almost hard to picture how compiler engineers get paid at all. Normally people sell tools, but... Programming languages are now tools freely given. And now even their advanced refactoring tools and IDE support. Strange to think about it, if I'm honest.