Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave

[Daniel Kraft]

Hi all,

I'm interested to apply for Google Summer of Code with Octave next year 
(provided there will be another GSoC and GNU is again accepted as 
mentoring organization, but I guess both will be true) and in general to 
look into contributing to Octave (although I don't know how much spare 
time I can spend on it outside of something like GSoC at the moment).

Octave seems interesting to me in particular since I both use it 
frequently (I've just finished Bachelor's courses in maths and physics 
and am now doing the respective graduate courses where I do a lot of the 
numerical / simulation programs in Octave since it is quite well suited 
for what I need to do there) and am also especially interested both in 
numerics aspects as well as computer language interpreter / compiler 
implementation.  So far I did not dive into the Octave code (besides 
compiling it from source and using the C++ interface), but have already 
some experience with language implementation in general -- I did 
implement emacs lisp support partially in GNU Guile as another GSoC 
project two years ago (partially = core language except emacs/text 
editor specific stuff like buffer-local bindings) and am working on the 
gfortran front-end to GCC for three years now.

Ok, sorry so far for the off-topic description of myself.  What I wanted 
to ask is whether there are some ideas for projects to work on that 
could fit for GSoC or in general something which is possibly not "fixing 
bugs" or doing a lot of "minor" improvements but seperate "new" things 
to work on and getting started.  Of course, what came first to my mind 
when thinking about this, was JIT or a byte-code VM approach to speed up 
interpretation of loops and other stuff -- but from what I read on the 
mailing list archives, this is already a somewhat "well known" project 
and I understand that there are a lot of difficulties in particular 
because of the dynamic typing.  Still, maybe there are currently some 
ideas or motivation to try something into that direction?  Otherwise, I 
also read something about attempts to make use of multiple cores -- this 
sounds interesting, too, are the ongoing projects towards (or interest 
in) that?  Some other things that would be useful for Octave and the 
user community?

Or possibly it would be best to try implementing some package for 
octave-forge which could provide some useful functionality?  I don't 
have any idea here, but if there are some, I'd be happy to know and 
think about that!

Thanks a lot!  Yours,
Daniel

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