GSOC Project Ideas

[James E Keenan]

Andrew Whitworth wrote:
>
> http://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki/GSoc2011
>
> some basic criteria and ideas about what would
> make a good and acceptable project:
>
> 1) Project ideas should be *doable* in a 2-3month work window
> 2) Projects should also be *desirable* to Parrot.
> 3) Projects can be for "core" parrot, or can also be within the Parrot
> ecosystem (extension and embedding projects, HLLs, libraries, etc).

I wonder if someone could work up any of the following ideas into GSOC 
proposals.  They are all excerpted from Patrick Michaud's end-of-January 
post on this list re Rakudo's needs from Parrot:

1. Profiling tools and documentation, especially at the Parrot sub 
level. ... [W]e still need some basic documentation and clear examples
for using Parrot's profiling capabilities.  To me, the existing
profiling runcore seems to produce results for nqp-rx programs that
either don't make any sense, or I'm unable to understand the results.

2. Serialization.  The major item that makes Rakudo startup so slow
is that we have to do so much initialization at startup to get
Rakudo's type system and setting in place.  There's not a good
way in Parrot to reliably serialize a set of language-defined types,
nor to attach compile-time attributes to subroutines and other "static"
objects in the bytecode itself.... Parrot definitely needs to explore 
this area as well and devise some strategies for compile-time creation 
of language-specific data structures, instead of requiring them
to always be built at program initialization.

3.  Create .pbc files directly from a Parrot program. ... Currently
the only reliable mechanism available for creating .pbc files is
parrot's command-line interface -- it's not possible for a Parrot
compiler to generate a .pbc on its own directly.

I *hope* that next month we designate these objectives as *roadmap 
goals* and organize teams to work on them for 3.6 (July) or 3.9 
(October).  But I think we can probably get some GSOCers working on 
these as well.

Can someone work these into feasible GSOC suggestions and place them on 
the wiki?

Thank you very much.
kid51