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.