Re: GSoC

[Martin Jambor <mjambor@suse.cz>]

Hello,

On Wed, Mar 06 2024, Abhinav Gupta via Gcc wrote:
> Dear GCC Community,
>     I hope this email finds you well. My name is Abhinav Gupta. I am a
> 3rd-year student at IIT Tirupati pursuing a bachelor's degree in
> computer science and engineering. I am writing to express my interest
> in contributing to the GCC project under GSoC.

We are very happy that you find contributing to GCC interesting.

> I am interested in two projects - Offloading to a separate process on
> the same host, I am already working in parallel computing,
> specifically parallelising tensor algorithms using various techniques
> as part of my research project at IIT Tirupati. Although this is not
> directly related to compilers, I will be able to get going with the
> project quickly.

I'd personally very much like to see this project implemented.  There is
a lot of information on offloading at
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Offloading

To give you a bit more context where the idea comes from, it was first
thought of in email thread starting with
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2022-October/603984.html and
the patch that was "scrubbed" from the email archive eventually became
commit
https://gcc.gnu.org/cgit/gcc/commit/?id=e4cba49413ca429dc82f6aa2e88129ecb3fdd943

I hope these pointers will further help help you find out where to look
when planning the project.  If you need more help, please feel free to
ask (I'm CCing Thomas who then is perhaps best placed to answer).

> The second project is Rust Front-End - both the BIR location support
> and rustc testsuite adapter are of interest to me,

Please note that Rust-GCC projects are a bit special in the sense that
they are often discussed primarily on Zulip of the gcc-rust team:

https://gcc-rust.zulipchat.com/

So you may want to reach out to them there as well.

> having worked on
> compiler front ends as part of my college's compiler design course
> combined with my experience in working with large libraries written in
> C++ (such as CTF) I believe that these two projects are something that
> I can do.

You seem to be quite ready!

>
> Proposed Timeline:
> I can start working as soon as my end-semester exams finish, i.e. 9th
> May 2024, and continue to work for however long it requires me to
> complete the project.
> Week 1-2 -> Knowing the existing code and understanding how it works.

Right, but please try to do a bit of this, at least on the high level,
also now when preparing the proposal.  There will be lots to learn in
the first weeks even so.  Mainly because...

> Week 3-8 -> Working on the implementation of whichever project we
> decide to move forward with
> Week 9-12 -> Testing and creating understandable documentation for the same.
>
> This is a very rough timeline,

...eventually the milestones in the application will have to be more
specific, mainly to demonstrate you have basic understanding of the
proposed project.

> and I will refine it further as we
> discuss the project idea. This email is more of a call for guidance
> than an application, and I would appreciate any feedback you give me.

This is a very good start.

Good luck!

Martin