SAOC Experience Report: Porting a fork-based GC

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On Monday, 22 July 2019 at 14:03:15 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Francesco Mecca ha written an experience report for the D Blog 
> about his SAOC 2018 project, porting Leandro Lucarella's old GC 
> from D1 to D2.
>
> The blog:
> https://dlang.org/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=2148&action=edit
>
> Reddit:
> > https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cgdk1r/symmetry_autumn_of_code_experience_report_porting/

A pull request to the D runtime was my final milestone. I was 
ready at the beginning of February, but I started to 
procrastinate. I’d had no previous communication with any of the 
reviewers and I was timorous about engaging with them. I spent a 
lot of time refactoring my code back and forth and delaying my 
pull request. At a certain point, I even considered abandoning 
the final milestone and providing the GC as a library. In the 
meantime, Rainer Scheutze published a threaded implementation of 
the mark phase that reduced the mark time in the GC and I lost 
faith in my project.

This seems like a major failure in the process that this was 
allowed to happen - good work almost went abandoned. How can we 
prevent this in future SAoC/GSoC? Without knowing what the mentor 
did/didn't do, an obvious answer seems like there should be a 
follow-up to ensure that the work done is actually getting in to 
the compiler/runtime/etc. To go so far and trip right at the 
finish line is unfortunate (glad to see that a PR is now open).