Requesting for project ideas

[bearophile]

Ishan Thilina Somasiri:

> We are required to do a 8 months long project in our final
> year. The project should consist of both a research and
> development component and an implementation. Our group
> is interested in areas such as,
>
>    * Information security
>    * Cloud
>    * Parallel computing
>    * Compilers

8 months is a lot of time, so projects like the projects of 
Google Summer of Code risk being too much small.

Some smaller projects are:
- Use LLVM to Just-in-time compile just the longer running 
compile-time functions (CTFE), for the LDC compiler (the 
functions that run quickly at compile-time are better left to the 
interpreter, because LLVM JIT has lot of overhead, it's not fast).
- Implement Windows exceptions for the LDC compiler.
- Implement efficiently the vector operations of the D language, 
and related matters.

A larger and more rearch-y project is to try to plug Z3 
(http://z3.codeplex.com/ ) in the D front-end to run some 
contracts at compile-time. And generally to study how to improve 
a fortified version of the D language ("Strong-D"?) to be used in 
high integrity programming, where Ada/SPARK are used.

Another medium sized project is to use some parts of the C/C++ 
static analyser of Clang (http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/ ), to 
create a similar tool for D-LDC.

Surely others will give you more ideas. Surely there is no lack 
of stuff to work on, because compared to the universe of 
tools/compilers for C/C++ the D ecosystem is almost a greenfield.

Bye,
bearophile