GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Martin Jambor]

Hello,

Google Summer of Code (aka GSoC) 2020 yesterday started accepting
Organization Applications.  I believe the last year was very successful
and so think that we want to take part again this year again.  I'll be
happy to volunteer to be the main Org Admin for GCC again (so let me
know if you think I shouldn't or that someone else should, but otherwise
I'll assume that I probably will). The deadline to apply is February
5th, so in the next three weeks we need to work on our project ideas and
have a list of willing mentors.

Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all (moderately)
seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this year and
ideally also come up with a project that they would like to lead.  I'm
collecting proposal on our wiki page
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode - feel free to add yours to the
top list there.  Or, if you are unsure, post your offer and project idea
as a reply here to the mailing list.

Eventually each developed project should have a) a project
title/description b) more detailed description of the project (2-5
sentences) c) expected outcomes d) skills required/preferred and e)
possible mentors [1].

Project ideas that come without an offer to also mentor them are always
fun to discuss, by all means feel free to reply to this email with yours
and I will attempt to find a mentor, but please be aware that we can
only use the suggestion it if we actually find one.

Everybody in the GCC community is invited to go over
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode and remove any outdated or
otherwise bad project suggestions and help improve viable ones which are
not yet viable.  I would especially want to ask GFortran and libstdc++
people to do so.

Finally, please continue helping (prospective) students figure stuff out
about GCC like you always do.  So far I think all of them enjoyed
working with us, even if many sometimes struggled with GCC's complexity.

More information together with GSoC 2020 time line is available at
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

Thank you, let's hope we attract some good young talent again this year.

Martin


[1] https://google.github.io/gsocguides/mentor/defining-a-project-ideas-list

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Nathan Sidwell]

On 1/15/20 5:45 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:

> Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all (moderately)
> seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this year and
> ideally also come up with a project that they would like to lead.  I'm
> collecting proposal on our wiki page
> https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode - feel free to add yours to the
> top list there.  Or, if you are unsure, post your offer and project idea
> as a reply here to the mailing list.

I have an idea for a GNU-Make project.

* Separate Make's job-control from the dependency walking.  Right now, 
theses are somewhat tangled up, due to history.  It would be nice to 
separate these into distinct components.  One wrinkle may be that 
single-threaded invocation might need to preserve the 
(implementation-defined) order of dependent rule execution, as makefiles 
that do not completely specify dependencies might be relying on that.

I ran into this problem with my hack to add a module-server into make, 
and hacked around it in an ugly fashion.

(I've not run this by the GNU-Make maintainers)

nathan

-- 
Nathan Sidwell

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Nicholas Krause]

On 1/16/20 8:33 AM, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> On 1/15/20 5:45 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
>
>> Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all (moderately)
>> seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this year and
>> ideally also come up with a project that they would like to lead.  I'm
>> collecting proposal on our wiki page
>> https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode - feel free to add yours to the
>> top list there.  Or, if you are unsure, post your offer and project idea
>> as a reply here to the mailing list.
>
> I have an idea for a GNU-Make project.
>
> * Separate Make's job-control from the dependency walking.  Right now, 
> theses are somewhat tangled up, due to history.  It would be nice to 
> separate these into distinct components.  One wrinkle may be that 
> single-threaded invocation might need to preserve the 
> (implementation-defined) order of dependent rule execution, as 
> makefiles that do not completely specify dependencies might be relying 
> on that.
>
> I ran into this problem with my hack to add a module-server into make, 
> and hacked around it in an ugly fashion.
>
> (I've not run this by the GNU-Make maintainers)
>
> nathan
>
Martin,
I've been looking into something similar to the scheduler for GCC 
parallelizing. Its a lot harder
than it seems due to IPA passes and other things like IPO. Not sure how 
Richard was planning to
handle that and unfortunately I've been busy and unable to write up my 
ideas for scaling GCC.

Since it may be awhile before it reaches the wiki page here is a link to 
a rough draft of my
ideas:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1po_RRgSCtRyYgMHjV0itW8iOzJXpTdHYIpC9gUMjOxk/edit?usp=sharing

I will be exploring the tooling issues when I'm time as that was my next 
step.

Sorry if there are grammar issues as its a rough draft,
Nick

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Martin Liška]

On 1/15/20 11:45 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all (moderately)
> seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this year and
> ideally also come up with a project that they would like to lead.  I'm
> collecting proposal on our wiki page

@David would you be interested in a analyzer topics? Seems to me
ideal for newcomers to come up with a static analyzer check?

Martin

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[David Malcolm]

On Mon, 2020-01-27 at 16:30 +0100, Martin Liška wrote:
> On 1/15/20 11:45 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> > Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all (moderately)
> > seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this year
> > and
> > ideally also come up with a project that they would like to
> > lead.  I'm
> > collecting proposal on our wiki page
> 
> @David would you be interested in a analyzer topics? Seems to me
> ideal for newcomers to come up with a static analyzer check?

I'm not quite sure what the appropriate size of a project would be, but
I'd be happy to mentor a student.  Some ideas I had for analyzer
topics:

* Generalize double-free checker to attribute-marking of
acquire/release API entrypoints so that the user can mark the
entrypoints and get a checker for that API "for free".

* Checking of the POSIX file-descriptor APIs (int rather than FILE *),
or some other POSIX API that we're not yet checking.

* Maybe add plugin support, and write a plugin to add a project
specific-checker for a project of interest to the student (Linux kernel?)

* C++ support (new/delete checking, exceptions, etc)

Thoughts?
Dave

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2020-02-06 at 20:58 -0500, David Malcolm wrote:
> On Mon, 2020-01-27 at 16:30 +0100, Martin Liška wrote:
> > On 1/15/20 11:45 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> > > Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all
> > > (moderately)
> > > seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this
> > > year
> > > and
> > > ideally also come up with a project that they would like to
> > > lead.  I'm
> > > collecting proposal on our wiki page
> > 
> > @David would you be interested in a analyzer topics? Seems to me
> > ideal for newcomers to come up with a static analyzer check?
> 
> I'm not quite sure what the appropriate size of a project would be,
> but
> I'd be happy to mentor a student.  Some ideas I had for analyzer
> topics:
> 
> * Generalize double-free checker to attribute-marking of
> acquire/release API entrypoints so that the user can mark the
> entrypoints and get a checker for that API "for free".
> 
> * Checking of the POSIX file-descriptor APIs (int rather than FILE
> *),
> or some other POSIX API that we're not yet checking.
> 
> * Maybe add plugin support, and write a plugin to add a project
> specific-checker for a project of interest to the student (Linux
> kernel?)
> 
> * C++ support (new/delete checking, exceptions, etc)
> 
> Thoughts?
> Dave

I've taken the liberty of adding the above idea to the list of
"Selected Project Ideas for 2020" on
  https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode
with me as mentor.

Dave

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[JeanHeyd Meneide]

Dear GCC Team,

     A bit of a procedural question. Do applications/projects for glibc
apply here to GCC? There are a few core functions I would like to add to
the library, that I think would be beneficial. Would a proposal for that be
welcome to GCC, or is it headed by a different organization?

Sincerely,
JeanHeyd Meneide

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 11:55 PM David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2020-02-06 at 20:58 -0500, David Malcolm wrote:
> > On Mon, 2020-01-27 at 16:30 +0100, Martin Liška wrote:
> > > On 1/15/20 11:45 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> > > > Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all
> > > > (moderately)
> > > > seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this
> > > > year
> > > > and
> > > > ideally also come up with a project that they would like to
> > > > lead.  I'm
> > > > collecting proposal on our wiki page
> > >
> > > @David would you be interested in a analyzer topics? Seems to me
> > > ideal for newcomers to come up with a static analyzer check?
> >
> > I'm not quite sure what the appropriate size of a project would be,
> > but
> > I'd be happy to mentor a student.  Some ideas I had for analyzer
> > topics:
> >
> > * Generalize double-free checker to attribute-marking of
> > acquire/release API entrypoints so that the user can mark the
> > entrypoints and get a checker for that API "for free".
> >
> > * Checking of the POSIX file-descriptor APIs (int rather than FILE
> > *),
> > or some other POSIX API that we're not yet checking.
> >
> > * Maybe add plugin support, and write a plugin to add a project
> > specific-checker for a project of interest to the student (Linux
> > kernel?)
> >
> > * C++ support (new/delete checking, exceptions, etc)
> >
> > Thoughts?
> > Dave
>
> I've taken the liberty of adding the above idea to the list of
> "Selected Project Ideas for 2020" on
>   https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode
> with me as mentor.
>
> Dave
>
>

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Joseph Myers]

On Thu, 13 Feb 2020, JeanHeyd Meneide wrote:

> Dear GCC Team,
> 
>      A bit of a procedural question. Do applications/projects for glibc
> apply here to GCC? There are a few core functions I would like to add to
> the library, that I think would be beneficial. Would a proposal for that be
> welcome to GCC, or is it headed by a different organization?

glibc ideas can be included under GNU, which has applied separately from 
GCC.

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2020-02/msg00121.html

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com

Re: GCC GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas

[Martin Jambor]

Hi David,

On Wed, Feb 12 2020, David Malcolm wrote:
> On Thu, 2020-02-06 at 20:58 -0500, David Malcolm wrote:
>> On Mon, 2020-01-27 at 16:30 +0100, Martin Liška wrote:
>> > On 1/15/20 11:45 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
>> > > Therefore, first and foremost, I would like to ask all
>> > > (moderately)
>> > > seasoned GCC contributors to consider mentoring a student this
>> > > year
>> > > and
>> > > ideally also come up with a project that they would like to
>> > > lead.  I'm
>> > > collecting proposal on our wiki page
>> > 
>> > @David would you be interested in a analyzer topics? Seems to me
>> > ideal for newcomers to come up with a static analyzer check?
>> 
>> I'm not quite sure what the appropriate size of a project would be,
>> but
>> I'd be happy to mentor a student.  Some ideas I had for analyzer
>> topics:
>> 
>> * Generalize double-free checker to attribute-marking of
>> acquire/release API entrypoints so that the user can mark the
>> entrypoints and get a checker for that API "for free".
>> 
>> * Checking of the POSIX file-descriptor APIs (int rather than FILE
>> *),
>> or some other POSIX API that we're not yet checking.
>> 
>> * Maybe add plugin support, and write a plugin to add a project
>> specific-checker for a project of interest to the student (Linux
>> kernel?)
>> 
>> * C++ support (new/delete checking, exceptions, etc)
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> Dave
>
> I've taken the liberty of adding the above idea to the list of
> "Selected Project Ideas for 2020" on
>   https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode
> with me as mentor.
>

Excellent! ...and sorry for not getting back to you earlier.

Thanks a lot,

Martin