Summer of Code/Project suggestions

Haskell projects for Google's Summer of Code.

This page is for mentors to add their ideas and to say which projects they'd be happy to supervise. It is also for students to see what kinds of projects are available. Students should not claim projects here however, but use the normal Google SoC application process. Mentors feel free to write your name under orphaned projects.

Cabal-get/HackageDB

Cabal-get is an automatic installer for Cabal libraries. The goal is to distribute the program with Cabal, but to achieve this we need to cut almost all of its dependencies. This project should be fairly easy (the code base of cabal-get is only 1K loc).

Mentor: Lemmih

GhcPlugins

Write a new plugin system using the new ghc-api. Enough of the groundwork has been laid out now that someone with a few months and some background could finish up the work.

GhcPlugins will replace the plugin system currently used in hIDE.

Mentor: Lemmih

Fix HsSDL (Haskell libSDL bindings) on Windows and MacOS

Implement various debugging tools in GHC

Dynamic breakpoints.
Generic object viewer.
Simple CCS for providing stack traces on exceptions and breakpoints.

Mentor: Lemmih

Handle recursive modules in GHC

Gtk / Graphics / GNOME related projects

I'd be happy to accept projects in this area. Last year I was unoficial mentor to Paolo who did the cairo bindings. Possible ideas include a dbus binding. (Feel free to add more ideas here or I might do as I think of them.)

Mentor: Duncan Coutts

Incremental GC for GHC

Implementing the incremental garbage collection algorithm described in the paper Non-stop Haskell in GHC.

hs-plugins based web server

Build an industrial-strength CGI/FastCGI/etc daemon to be used for enterprise-type web applications.

HSP does have the hs-plugins part. So do new versions of WASH. In HAppS the enterprise part is keeping us away from hs-plugins, if it were for research only there would be hs-plugins support (4-8 hours of work).

Continuation based DSL on top of HAppS

Do you have a vision how to do better than WASH? Integrate continuation based interaction with client or use something like Functional Forms for the interaction. How to best to interact with XML etc. Other HAppS related projects also possible.

Mentor: Einar Karttunen (musasabi)

Parsers for various programming languages

Populate the Language hierarchy of modules with new parsers for many languages, at the moment it does only contain Language.Haskell.

Mentor: Shae Matijs Erisson (shapr)

Yi projects

Syntax Highlighting, Plugins. It's quite a peculiar kind of application. Its design is based on type-safe dynamically loadable modules and it is more dynamic than Emacs!

Mentor: Shae Matijs Erisson (shapr)

Students' ideas / Game

I'm ready to take on anyone willing to write a useful application or game (preferably a program) given that it is of reasonable size (upper limitaton).

Mentor: Johan Henriksson (Mahogny)

Bioinformatics tools

1. Further develop RBR, a tool for masking repeats. This can include a) optimize (using FastPackedString and/or a new internal data structure); b) extend functionality.

2. Develop a tool for annotation/classification of sequences. This would involve computation on and visualization of graphs (experience with the latter would be really great).

Prior bioinformatics knowledge is not a requirement. Please contact me for details.

Mentor: Ketil (ketil@ii.uib.no)

Concurrent disk-based data structures

Implement B+tree or a variant supporting concurrent updates using STM, serialize updates into a write ahead log and provide for serialization. Bind the whole thing with a nice HaskellDB like API. Variations on the theme possible.

Mentor: Einar Karttunen

Haskellnet

We have got cgi, ftp, http, and irc. Get them into shape in the hierarchical libraries as well as adding a number of other protocols, like nntp, smtp and pop3, imap4, ... much like the Ocamlnet project.

Mentor: Shae Matijs Erisson (shapr)

Port ghc-api's eval mechanism to Yi

Yi is an editor written and extensible in Haskell. Construct a binding to ghc-api such that new expressions may be evaluated at runtime in the editor, accessing the editors internal structures in a type safe way, dynamically. elisp for Haskell!

Mentor: Don Stewart (dons@cse.unsw.edu.au) and Lemmih.

Data.ByteString

Extend the Data.ByteString interface to arbitrary (Storable a) arrays. Data.ByteString provides a high performance api to arrays of bytes. Generalise this to arbitrary vectors of Storable a values, winning fame and glory in the process.