GSoC 2018 - Your project ideas

[Basile B.]

On Tuesday, 5 December 2017 at 18:20:40 UTC, Seb wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2018 is about to start soon [1] 
> [...]
> I am looking forward to hearing (1) what you think can be done 
> in three months by a student and (2) will have a huge impact on 
> the D ecosystem.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Seb
>
> [1] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline
> [2] https://wiki.dlang.org/GSOC_2018_Ideas

My two cents:

## Lowerer

1. I think that this project is too abstract, there's no concrete 
application.
2. Issue 5051 is mentioned but i think that many features listed 
in this project are actually **already** done when the switch 
"-vcg-ast" is used (scope lowering(), foreach() lowering, ...)

## Phobos: D Standard Library

- std.units: no there are user libs for that, particularly one by 
klickverbot and one of its fork that is more maintained IIRC.
- std.serialization: yes, this is the idea i like the more, 
although we can regret that std.xml2 would have been good to be 
there as supported file format.
- std.container: skeptical, changes are announced for the 
allocators, Big(O) notation was planned in another container 
project that should have been made by Alexandrescu (although this 
was announced something like 2 years ago already).
- std.decimal: I've seen that J.Stouffler has just started an 
stdx project for this.

## DUB

There are good ideas. A proper plan is needed.

## Linux debugger

I think it's a bad idea.

1. because of the 3 months. Would it be usable despite of being 
an interesting for the student ?
2. what will it do better than GDB ?
3. I.Buclaw is the official maintainer for the D support in GDB, 
so why not doing something in GDB instead (yeah but what... )


So in short, i see only two good projects:
- std.serializer
- DUB

The others, excepted those i find useless or unrealistic or 
existing, are just "meh", but it's a personal point of view. It's 
a problem of balance: it must be interesting and motivating for 
the student but also useful for the community.