[GSoC] Container proposals by Ishan and Christian

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

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

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.

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 filter or a trie.

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.

Any thoughts, please share.


Thanks,

Andrei