[Haskell-cafe] SoC project: advice requested

[Gábor Lehel]

Hi all,

I would very much like to apply for a Summer of Code project this
year; however, I'm having trouble nailing down a project which is both
(a) of appropriate scope and (b) which interests and motivates me.
There's also obviously the question of needing a mentor for the
project. Regarding (b), I'm finding it hard to get really excited
about hacking on Cabal or other infrastructure: I'd much rather like
to add some kind of new, interesting, and useful capability to GHC
itself. Naturally, this comes into a kind of tension with (a). I'd
love to work on something type system related, but have the feeling
that going from 'amateur Haskeller' to 'type theory and GHC expert'
within the course of a single summer is likely going to be too much.
(Feel free to correct me on this point, though!)

The two projects I've been able to think of which seem like they
*might* be appropriate are: integrating the standard 'deriving'
mechanism with Template Haskell to support deriving custom classes;
and adding native FFI support for passing C structs / tuples
(arbitrary products?) of FFI-able types by value, as discussed in [1].
Would either of these be not-too-big / would anyone be willing to
mentor them? Alternately, I'd be very happy to receive suggestions
about other GHC-related work which would be considered appropriate.
(Or, heck, any other compiler.)

A related problem is that, having done only minimal GHC hacking so
far, drawing up a detailed plan / design in advance as part of the
proposal would be difficult. If this is considered necessary and there
is someone willing to mentor the project I'd be happy to research the
problem in advance of the submission deadline so I can submit a more
detailed proposal. Alternately, if it's deemed acceptable to learn the
ropes / come up to speed as part of the SoC itself that's fine by me
as well. (Wasn't this sort of the point originally?)

Background info: I've taken part in the SoC once before, back in 2006
(when I applied to KDE to work on Krita). I don't yet have any Hackage
packages to my name, however I'm working on a C++-to-Haskell bindings
generator for my bachelor's thesis (the primary target being Qt*)
which is likely to spawn quite a few. (I've avoided making any noise
about this because I didn't want to put the cart before the horse: the
plan was (and still is) to announce something once there is something
worth announcing, and it's not at that point quite yet.)

Apologies for not writing this email a couple weeks earlier; I have a
day job and next to the thesis it didn't leave much time to brainstorm
and research. (The job isn't Haskell-related and doesn't even pay as
well, so if I get accepted I'll have no compunctions scaling it back
(even completely). And the deadline for the thesis is May 15th, which
is convenient enough.)

Thanks,
~g

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/msg61034.html

* Yes, I know qtHaskell exists. I have some, how to say, 'differences
of opinion' with regards to its API, and it's not open source anyways.

-- 
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.