Hi Gábor,
There are a few non-Cabal projects on the ideas list
(http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/report/1). Just
thought I mentioned it in case you missed it.
2011/4/1 Gábor Lehel
Alternately, I'd be very happy to receive suggestions about other GHC-related work which would be considered appropriate. (Or, heck, any other compiler.)
Perhaps you could send an email to the GHC mailing list and ask if they have any good GSoC projects? I'm not sure the Simons are reading every post on this list.
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?)
It's not required but it helps. Us mentors need to figure out if you're likely to finish your project or not. Showing that you understand what needs to be done is a good sign. If you're not sure what needs to be done there's still a chance you'll get accepted if people who already know GHC thinks one summer is enough time to both get familiar with GHC and add something worthwhile.
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.)
How about adding Haskell support for SWIG? Being able to call C++ libraries from Haskell would be very useful. Cheers, Johan