Google Summer of Code 2016

[Kaivan Shah]

Hi,

I am interested in working on one of the ideas on the page - Specialized call-site method caching. I am a Junior at University of Texas at Austin and my major is Computer Science. I would rate my competency level in C++, Java and Haskell as intermediate, though I am foreign to Julia. But as the requirement implies that this project will help me familiarize with Julia.

If I could talk to a mentor to discuss more about the idea and the next steps, it would be great. I am excited and looking forward to hear back from you.

Thank you,

Kaivan Shah
University of Texas at Austin
Class of 2017

[Isaiah Norton]

Hi Kaivan,

There is an initial implementation of the call-site caching idea here:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/11862

Please review that PR to get a sense for the direction and depth of the project. As you will see in the comments, there are several large, open questions remaining. I checked with @yuyichao, and he does not have time to update the PR in the near future. So, updating and finishing the work started in that PR could potentially be a large portion of a GSoC project. This would require to rebase it for recent (significant) compiler changes, implement and test the suggested improvements in the comments, and evaluate/optimize performance against some of the important packages in the ecosystem.

There are several people who will be available to help with implementation questions, but for now I can be a point of contact.

As a more general note, probably the strongest indicator for both acceptance and success of a GSoC project is to have made some contributions prior to the application deadline (which is March 25th). In light of that, I've listed below a few examples of small, self-contained projects/bug-fixes that touch the compiler or runtime. I would suggest to look through these and select a few to get your feet wet contributing to Julia base. If you are new to LLVM, I would also suggest to do the Kaleidoscope tutorial.

- easy issues:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/14591

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/10420

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/14450

- intermediate:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/14577

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/8392

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/15101

If you have questions about those, feel free to ask in this thread.

Best,

Isaiah