As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which full-bore coding starts tomorrow:

1. Extended Unicode Support by Dmitry Olshansky
2. Mono-D by Alex Bothe
3. Removing the gc lock from common allocations in D by Antti-Ville Tuunainen.

We have a solid staff of mentors, but the larger community could add a lot of value to the projects in the way of giving guidance to the students, providing feedback, and such. To make this easier, I created three mailing lists for the respective projects above:

gsoc2012dmitry@erdani.com
gsoc2012alex@erdani.com
gsoc2012antti-ville@erdani.com

These lists will carry traffic related to student-mentors communication.

If you'd like to help these projects or simply stay current with what's going on, please send me email (erdani.com/index.php/contact) and I will subscribe you to the list(s) of interest to you.

I should add that the nature of communication on these lists is different from the normal newsgroup exchange. Please refrain from off-topic discussions, tangential debates, and generally anything that is not directly intended to help the students do a good job on the projects.


Thanks,

Andrei

On 2012-05-21 00:01, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which full-bore
> coding starts tomorrow:
>
> 1. Extended Unicode Support by Dmitry Olshansky
> 2. Mono-D by Alex Bothe
> 3. Removing the gc lock from common allocations in D by Antti-Ville
> Tuunainen.

I was just wondering what happened to the GSoC projects. Was this ever announced, that it was these projects that were chosen?

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 21-05-2012 08:21, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2012-05-21 00:01, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which full-bore
>> coding starts tomorrow:
>>
>> 1. Extended Unicode Support by Dmitry Olshansky
>> 2. Mono-D by Alex Bothe
>> 3. Removing the gc lock from common allocations in D by Antti-Ville
>> Tuunainen.
>
> I was just wondering what happened to the GSoC projects. Was this ever
> announced, that it was these projects that were chosen?
>

Nope. Not sure why.

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex@lycus.org
http://lycus.org

On Sunday, 20 May 2012 at 22:01:55 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which full-bore coding starts tomorrow:

As discussed in the interview and (quite badly) on the application, I will delay the start by a week on account of finals.

> 3. Removing the gc lock from common allocations in D by Antti-Ville Tuunainen.

My project turned out to be rather badly named, as due to changed circumstances, I will not work on the lock, at least not initially. Instead, David convinced me that I should try to implement the druntime side of precise marking. Lockless allocation will be implemented one the precise marking works, or when I'm totally stuck on it for long enough that I need to work on something else for a while instead.

21.05.2012 2:01, Andrei Alexandrescu написал:
> As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which full-bore
> coding starts tomorrow:
>
> 1. Extended Unicode Support by Dmitry Olshansky
> 2. Mono-D by Alex Bothe

Yes, lets accept D failure in writing anything as complicated as IDE and glorify C#!

-- 
Денис В. Шеломовский
Denis V. Shelomovskij

On Monday, 21 May 2012 at 06:35:48 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
> On 21-05-2012 08:21, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> I was just wondering what happened to the GSoC projects. Was this ever
>> announced, that it was these projects that were chosen?
> Nope. Not sure why.

Yeah, I wonder as well – in any case, the chosen projects have been public on Melange (Google's GSoC platform) for ages, but I didn't want to sabotage any official announcement plan by posting the link myself… ;)

David

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Denis Shelomovskij < verylonglogin.reg@gmail.com> wrote:

> 21.05.2012 2:01, Andrei Alexandrescu написал:
>
>  As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which full-bore
>> coding starts tomorrow:
>>
>> 1. Extended Unicode Support by Dmitry Olshansky
>> 2. Mono-D by Alex Bothe
>>
>
> Yes, lets accept D failure in writing anything as complicated as IDE and glorify C#!
>
>
Gee, thanks for your enthusiastic support for GSOC projects that will greatly forward the D ecosystem.

Ultimately, what's useful to the D community (for reasons discussed in these NGs many times over) is that we have working, mature, feature-rich IDEs. The languages they're implemented in are mostly irrelevant, and in MonoDevelop's case, trying to add language support via a plugin written in D to an IDE written in C# would be silly. Would you extend Eclipse in C++? It just doesn't make any sense at all.

What's more, building tools for D in languages other than D can be
extremely useful. Every time a discussion for a D compiler written in D
comes up, no one really likes to mention the benefits we've gotten from
having a compiler written in C++:
 - there are no bootstrapping problems because C++ exists on basically
every platform D would ever want to target
 - GDC and LDC were built without reimplementing the entire compiler and
exist on platforms DMD doesn't support
 - GDC can be formally added to GCC without the aforementioned
reimplementation of the compiler

There's no shame in building off solid technologies, even if those technologies have no direct link to the D ecosystem. Building IDEs in D does demonstrate that D is powerful and useful, but except for Rainer Schuetze and Visual D (which actually /is/ written in D), D has not been the right tool for the job for reasons that have little to do with the language's actual merits.

The response at this point is generally, "Why build off MonoDevelop/Eclipse/VisualStudio when you could build from scratch?" and again, the question is whether building from scratch makes sense. Existing frameworks exist, are very powerful, are already familiar to many developers, and are generally easier to build on. There's certainly nothing stopping anyone from working from scratch, but building from an existing framework will get faster results and all the aforementioned benefits. If the heap of abandoned incomplete IDE-from-scratch projects on DSource says anything, it says that fast results are important in community-driven projects.

I, for one, look forward to seeing what Alex can build this summer. Best of luck as you start your project.

Andrew

21.05.2012 23:48, Andrew Wiley написал:
> On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Denis Shelomovskij
> <verylonglogin.reg@gmail.com <mailto:verylonglogin.reg@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     21.05.2012 2:01, Andrei Alexandrescu написал:
>
>         As you may recall, we have three GSoC 2012 projects for which
>         full-bore
>         coding starts tomorrow:
>
>         1. Extended Unicode Support by Dmitry Olshansky
>         2. Mono-D by Alex Bothe
>
>
>     Yes, lets accept D failure in writing anything as complicated as IDE
>     and glorify C#!
>
>
> Gee, thanks for your enthusiastic support for GSOC projects that will
> greatly forward the D ecosystem.
>
> Ultimately, what's useful to the D community (for reasons discussed in
> these NGs many times over) is that we have working, mature, feature-rich
> IDEs. The languages they're implemented in are mostly irrelevant, and in
> MonoDevelop's case, trying to add language support via a plugin written
> in D to an IDE written in C# would be silly. Would you extend Eclipse in
> C++? It just doesn't make any sense at all.
>
> What's more, building tools for D in languages other than D can be
> extremely useful. Every time a discussion for a D compiler written in D
> comes up, no one really likes to mention the benefits we've gotten from
> having a compiler written in C++:
>   - there are no bootstrapping problems because C++ exists on basically
> every platform D would ever want to target
>   - GDC and LDC were built without reimplementing the entire compiler
> and exist on platforms DMD doesn't support
>   - GDC can be formally added to GCC without the aforementioned
> reimplementation of the compiler
>
> There's no shame in building off solid technologies, even if those
> technologies have no direct link to the D ecosystem. Building IDEs in D
> does demonstrate that D is powerful and useful, but except for Rainer
> Schuetze and Visual D (which actually /is/ written in D), D has not been
> the right tool for the job for reasons that have little to do with the
> language's actual merits.
>
> The response at this point is generally, "Why build off
> MonoDevelop/Eclipse/VisualStudio when you could build from scratch?" and
> again, the question is whether building from scratch makes sense.
> Existing frameworks exist, are very powerful, are already familiar to
> many developers, and are generally easier to build on. There's certainly
> nothing stopping anyone from working from scratch, but building from an
> existing framework will get faster results and all the aforementioned
> benefits. If the heap of abandoned incomplete IDE-from-scratch projects
> on DSource says anything, it says that fast results are important in
> community-driven projects.
>
> I, for one, look forward to seeing what Alex can build this summer. Best
> of luck as you start your project.
>
> Andrew

I agree. But that isn't what I meant to say. There is no reason D Parser/Autocomplete proposal system/etc. should be written in C#. IMHO C# for MonoDevelop and Java for Eclipse should be just layers of interaction with one monolithic standard Core D-IDE system. It's completely wrong that every IDE developer creates his own Core D-IDE stuff. I dream about such Core system so Visual-D/Mono-D/DDT will have same autocompletion/refactoring/etc. and every of these proect will be thin, easy to understand/improve IDE environment abstraction layer.

-- 
Денис В. Шеломовский
Denis V. Shelomovskij

On Tuesday, 22 May 2012 at 06:43:02 UTC, Denis Shelomovskij wrote:
> I agree. But that isn't what I meant to say. There is no reason D Parser/Autocomplete proposal system/etc. should be written in C#. IMHO C# for MonoDevelop and Java for Eclipse should be just layers of interaction with one monolithic standard Core D-IDE system. It's completely wrong that every IDE developer creates his own Core D-IDE stuff. I dream about such Core system so Visual-D/Mono-D/DDT will have same autocompletion/refactoring/etc. and every of these proect will be thin, easy to understand/improve IDE environment abstraction layer.

Implementing such Core system is the goal of my DCT project.
But that's a huge amount of work, and it would be even longer
without Mono D :)
So thanks a lot to Alex for the great work!

On 2012-05-22 08:42, Denis Shelomovskij wrote:

> I agree. But that isn't what I meant to say. There is no reason D
> Parser/Autocomplete proposal system/etc. should be written in C#. IMHO
> C# for MonoDevelop and Java for Eclipse should be just layers of
> interaction with one monolithic standard Core D-IDE system. It's
> completely wrong that every IDE developer creates his own Core D-IDE
> stuff. I dream about such Core system so Visual-D/Mono-D/DDT will have
> same autocompletion/refactoring/etc. and every of these proect will be
> thin, easy to understand/improve IDE environment abstraction layer.

I completely agree.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg