D 2019 GSoC projects - annoucement

[Seb]

Hi all,

I'm very happy to announce that this year we will have six 
amazing GSoC students:

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/6103365956665344

As I mentioned in earlier threads, we had a lot of great 
applications and, thus, we had a really hard time with the 
selection.
For the students who we unfortunately couldn't accept this time, 
please stay tuned in D.announce for a few more days, there's 
something very interesting for you that will be announced in a 
few days.

As I presume you already are curious what projects got selected, 
let's get right to it:

Language Server Protocol in D (Manish Khurana)
----------------------------------------------

This project aims to develop a new fully-functional language 
server for D programming language using dmd library.

Independency of D from the C Standard Library (Stefanos Baziotis)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

An effort to decouple D from the C standard library.


Persistent Data Structures for D (lesderid)
-------------------------------------------

Developing an idiomatic D library for persistent/immutable data 
structures


Dataframes for D (Prateek Nayak)
--------------------------------

This project aims at bringing native dataframes to D Programming 
Language. The main task would be to implement a dataframe which 
supports multi-indexing, column binary operations, grouping and 
data aggregation. Along with the dataframe will also come 
functionality to parse data from and write data to a CSV file 
without any hassle.


Header generation for C/C++ (Eduard Staniloiu)
----------------------------------------------

Automated C/C++ header generation from D files


Replace Runtime Hooks with Templates (Dan Printzell)
----------------------------------------------------


D’s betterC mode is an important tool to be able to use D on 
bare-metal and embedded platforms. By disabling, for example the 
class support, the compiles does not need to as many runtime 
functions and types to be implemented for the code to compile and 
link. This makes the life of a bare-metal developer much easier.

But there is a catch! A lot of the language features runtime 
hooks, which in turn requires the TypeInfo class to be able to 
function. One way of solving both of these problems is by moving 
runtime hooks to use templates instead. This solves the betterC 
by removing the dependency of classes (the TypeInfo class), and 
it solves the safety issue because now the compiler will have all 
the information about the hook and it can verify it itself and 
not just trust that the runtime developer remembered to mark the 
hook correctly.

This proposal will work on translating all the array hooks from 
using the TypeInfo class to templates.

What's next?
------------

For now our GSoC students are in the "community bonding period", 
the actual coding period starts on May 27th.
This means they are strongly encouraged to get familiar with the 
D community, their project and the mentor. In particular this 
means brushing up their D skills, clarifying/improving their 
roadmap and removing/discussing any potential obstacles with 
their mentor / community.

I will publish more infos after DConf.