On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 9:01 AM, Csaba Hruska <csaba.hruska@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm wondering about the topic of my gsoc project. [..]

I'm interested in these areas:

- improving cabal (more sophisticated dependency, multi version, compiler support, etc) [..]

I like the idea of improving cabal, and one can definitely see the community benefit of work on such a pervasively used tool.

- Another idea is to improve GHC's new LLVM backend. [..]

I like this idea, but like you said, a number of people seem to be interested in working on the LLVM backend this summer, so it may be a crowded space and hard to coordinate. But anything that could expose more information about the shape of thunks and slot usage to LLVM could help a great deal with alias analysis, which is usually in LLVM the biggest barrier to reordering and rewriting.

- Another LLVM related idea is to create a framework to support writing llvm passes in haskell, this should be based on existing llvm haskell binding. [..]

I think this would be an amazing value-add for the LLVM backend, and might open the door to a whole new class of Haskell optimizations.

- I'm also interested in computer graphics. While this kind of project could look really good, the community could not benefit from it. [..]

While I personally enjoy working on 3d graphics in general, it is hard to sell the community benefit.

-Edward Kmett