[GSoC] Container proposals by Ishan and Christian

[Jens Mueller]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> We are honored to receive a fair amount of interest from students at
> our GSoC 2011.
> 
> One issue is that at least one student (who contacted me off-list)
> couldn't find a project to work on that would best play into his
> strengths. I think it's not too late to improve our GSoC ideas page
> (http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?GSOC_2011_Ideas).
> 
> Another issue is that we have competing proposals on identical or
> overlapping projects. I am trying to solve one of these matters
> privately, and I think it would be best if we could solve the others
> in the community.
> 
> I'm referring to Ishan's and Christian's proposals for containers.
> Both proposals have pros and cons, and I predict it would be very
> difficult to make a decision. Therefore, I'm trying to avoid that
> "by design", i.e. by finding a solution that would keep both busy on
> useful work that is in line with their capabilities.
> 
> First, I suggest that anyone interested gives a thorough read to the
> two proposals:
> 
> http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/ishanthilina/1

That proposal is not made public. I.e. I cannot access it.

> http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/murphy/1
> 
> Both students seem to be quite enthusiastic and capable. Two things
> that I'm worrying about are:
> 
> 1. Both seem to be quite fresh on D, so they'll need close coaching
> at least in the beginning.
> 
> 2. Both students seem unfamiliar with the STL, which is a difficult
> skill to acquire in a short time frame and is quite recommended for
> working on D's containers.

Both valid points. I'd like to help. But how do I know that I'm familiar
with the STL? It's containers and generic algorithms glued together via
iterators. I've read Effective STL and used the STL but I have never
looked at an implementation of the STL. On rare occasions I dived into
GNU STL to figure out what was going on.
Regarding the former: They should start reading your book, if they
haven't. What do you mean by coaching? Looking at their code and giving
feedback?

> If the students could comment on that, that would be helpful.
> 
> Here's how I think we can solve the problem of overlapping projects:
> 
> 1. One way is to convince one of the students to work on a different
> topic that would also play into his strengths and is of interest to
> him. Any suggestions are welcome, both from the students and the
> community.
> 
> 2. Another approach would be to expand the scope of the project.
> There are plenty of interesting containers out there (see e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/500607/what-are-the-lesser-known-but-cool-data-structures)
> that are darn useful. I suggest students to look over those and
> answer if they'd fell comfortable about implementing e.g. a Bloom

That is a nice list. I myself don't know most of these. I find extending
each project with an additional data structure more appealing. But the
students have to decide between those two options. I like the second one
more because then I learn something new.

> With an expanded containers project we could (assuming all goes
> smooth) benefit of a host of solid containers by fall. The thing is
> that would definitely require very intensive mentoring. I'd probably
> be a mentor, and I'd need at least one to be comfortable about
> putting this option on the table.

Can you express intensive monitoring in hours per week from your
experience?

BTW I never introduced myself and seeing all of the students submitting
proposals and gently introducing themselves I feel kind of cheap. The
applications are very good.
My name is Jens Mueller. I earned my CS degree from Humboldt University
Berlin in 2008. Currently I'm struggling as a PhD student.

Jens