Hi, I'd like to advertise three Google Summer of Code projects that I recently added to the list [1] of proposed projects: *** Build multiple Cabal packages in parallel *** http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1594 Many developers have multi-core machines but Cabal runs the build process in a single thread, only making use of one core. If the build process could be parallelized build times could be cut by perhaps a factor of 2-8, depending on the number of cores and opportunity of parallel execution available. *** Simpler support for isolated/sandboxed Cabal builds *** http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1590 cabal-dev and capri allow developers to build packages in their own sandboxes, using a separate package database for each. This allows for isolated builds and prevents breakages due e.g. package upgrades. Merging cabal-dev into Cabal allows us to share lots of code and makes the feature more accessible to developers. *** Convert the text package to use UTF-8 internally *** http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1595 When the text package was created, early benchmarks showed that using UTF-16 as the internal representation for Unicode code points was the fastest. The package still uses UTF-16 internally. The benchmarks might not have given a complete picture of the performance implications of using different internal encodings: all benchmarks were run on input data that used the same encoding as used internally, but most real world data uses UTF-8. If the benchmarks would also have taken the cost of decoding and encoding from and to UTF-8 the results might have been different. The goal of this project is to revisit the choice of internal encoding. I encourage any interested students to have a look at the three proposals (and the other proposals on the list), discuss them on this list, and sign up for GSoC (after March 28). 1. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/report/1 Cheers, Johan