Re: Fwd: Google Summer of Code

[Per Bothner]

On 03/18/2015 02:41 PM, Alicia Carlo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> my name is Wendy Figueroa and I am interested in participating in the
> Google summer of code, and I came across your
> http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/Ideas-and-tasks.html project.
> Specifically, the project that aims to add Common Lisp support to
> Kawa. I've never worked on a project like this, but I'm very
> interested. I have some experience in ANSI Common Lisp and Emacs
> Scheme. Can you please go into a little more detail as to what I
> would need to do, and any reading material I'd need to be familiar
> with?

We already had a SoC student working on Kawa Common Lisp.
There is definitely more to be done, but I'm not sure what would
make a good GSoC project at this point.  For example CLOS is probably
too much, and would require a lot of design thinking that I would want
to be involved with.  (Also, I'm working on some issues related to
multi-methods, and I want that to be stable before anyone tackles CLOS
multi-methods.)

There are lots of missing CL functions, but that's mostly a lot of small
micro-projects.  I'm trying to think of a coherent sub-project that
is big enough but not too much.  I'll ask some other people.  If you want to
check out Kawa Common Lisp maybe you can think of something.

Improving Emacs Lisp might be a better project.  There are a few sub-projects
that could add up to a plausible SoC project:
- Handle the "lexical-binding" property that was recently implemented for GNU 
Emacs.
- Re-implement the nil value as Java null.
- Implement missing language/control structures.
The above are focusing on the Emacs Lisp language core, rather than the
display types (buffers, windows, etc).  There is also plenty that needs to be
done on the display side, which has seen some "bit rot" over the years.
Implementing/fixing the GNU Emacs API for (say) faces or menus are examples.


--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/