Google Summer of Code 2017 ideas & plans

About

Many developers in the Idris project have expressed interest in participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Recently, the 2017 version of GSoC has been announced, and so this page serves as a place to collect ideas and plans about possible projects and organisational structure.

Organisation

There are some links from Google directed at defining and organising a summer of code as a mentoring organization:

Project ideas

Infrastructure

Frontend

NAD's total parser combinators
- http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~nad/publications/danielsson-parser-combinators.html
C-Library binding generation
Improve compilation time
- Possibly using Fragnix style compilation
Design and implement ideas for improving error messages in Idris
- Inspiration from: http://elm-lang.org/blog/compiler-errors-for-humans
Rewrite the Parser (again) to make it have more useful error messages

Backend

Add a TT* stage to the Idris compiler
- Unless @ziman does it in the meantime
Create a fast RTS
- Possibly a Malfunction back-end
Working LLVM backend & Runtime System
Implement a better garbage collection algorithm
Add support for unboxing
Syscall interface in the C/LLVM runtime
Reimplement type providers to use elaborator reflection instead

Library

Parser generator (such as Happy in Haskell)
Regular expression library
Implement libraries for compilers in Idris
Model/Implement (parts of) USB protocol
Implement a fast immutable array library http://michael.steindorfer.name/publications/oopsla15.pdf