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. Students should not claim projects here however, but using the normal Google Summer of Code application process, see the student FAQ for details.

Cabal

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 (lemmih@gmail.com)

Distributed compilation

A-la distcc, the distributed compilation of Haskell modules.

GHC

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 (lemmih@gmail.com)

Implement various debugging tools in GHC

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

Mentor: Lemmih (lemmih@gmail.com)

Incremental Garbage Collector for GHC

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

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@scannedinavian.com)

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.

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

Unicode layer over Data.ByteString

Extend the Data.ByteString interface to support Unicode.

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

Improve performance of numerical code

GHC's performance for double and float intensive code is not as good as it could be. Find out why and improve it. Requires GHC backend hacking. Must be very Haskell literate or have knowledge of code generators.

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

Port the Clean high performance string code

Clean does very well for low level string benchmarks. Find out what they do, and port it to Data.ByteString

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

Graphics

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. (Feel free to add more ideas here or I might do as I think of them.)

Mentor: Duncan Coutts

D-BUS Binding

Haskell bindings to the D-BUS message bug system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another.

Mentor: Duncan Coutts

Embed ghci/ghci-api in ion

ion is a cool window manager written by Tuomo Valkonen, a Haskell hacker. It is currently extensible in Ion, but a very interesting project would be to work out how to dynamically extend it in Haskell, perhaps using ideas from Yi.

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

Web development

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)

Editing

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 (lemmih@gmail.com).

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@scannedinavian.com)

Generic Hide Hacking

• Rewrite plugins for the new plugin-system.
• Integration with Lambdabot, access to plugins through Hide.
• Other?

Mentor: Don Stewart (dons@cse.unsw.edu.au), Lemmih (lemmih@gmail.com)

Games

Frag hacking

Frag is a 3d first person shootup game written in Haskell, using OpenGL. It can be greatly extended in all sorts of ways. If you're in to gaming, have a look at this.

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

Students' ideas / Games

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

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)

Concurrency / Network

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@scannedinavian.com)

UNIX

A Haskell shell

Concise syntax and higher order functions would make a Haskell shell very useful. This project would aim to produce a real world shell written in Haskell, and using an embedded domain specific language to encode common operations.

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

Databases

HaskellDB

Port HaskellDB to HList

HaskellDB currently uses its own record system, which (I believe) is less powerful than HList. The project is to port HaskellDB to use HList instead, making any necessary changes to the interface to make this possible and to fit HList better.

Mentor: Björn Bringert (bringert@cs.chalmers.se)

Implement back-end dependent SQL generation in HaskellDB

Currently HaskellDB uses the same SQL generator for all database systems. Unfortunately different database systems support different SQL dialects. The project is to make it possible to use different SQL generators for different back-ends, and implement generators for common database systems such as for example MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. The project could also include adding support for back-end specific SQL extensions (such as various string and date functions, non-standard field types etc.) to the HaskellDB query language.

Mentor: Björn Bringert (bringert@cs.chalmers.se)