Contributing to package:native

[Hasnaa Mohamed]

Hi 
I am Hassnaa, and I am planning to apply for GSoC 2026 with the Dart organization.

I have previously made contributions to the Dart's VM [https://dart-review.googlesource.com/c/sdk/+/457660], which gave me a good grasp of the runtime and how Dart handles memory,also in enhancing the docs [https://dart-review.googlesource.com/c/sdk/+/457580]. For GSoC, I want to focus my efforts on the native interop ecosystem (ffigen, jnigen, and Native Assets). I find the work on "Native Assets" and seamless Swift/Java interop particularly exciting.

Since I am shifting focus to this repository, I want to make sure I have a deep understanding of the library architecture before the proposal period begins. Could you point me toward:

Key technical resources or design docs (beyond the READMEs) that you recommend for new contributors to these packages?

A starter task or area where I can begin contributing to get familiar with the codebase? I'm happy to help with bug fixes, test coverage, or documentation in ffigen or jnigen.

Thanks in advance

[Daco Harkes]

Hi Hasnaa,

Nice to meet you!

The easiest packages to start contributing to would be JNIgen and FFIgen, as these are standalone projects. (The packages related to build hooks require rolling into the SDK and usually require designing solutions across multiple repositories and rolling changes from one to the other.)

+Liam Appelbe owns FFIgen and JNIgen. Maybe he can elaborate on some tasks that would be easy to pick up for a new contributor.

(P.S. There is no package:native. The repo contains multiple packages.)

Kind regards,

 •  Daco Harkes
 •  Software Engineer
 •  dacoh...@google.com 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "dart-gsoc" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dart-gsoc+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dart-gsoc/f9cb9a27-702c-4f3c-97ef-0cd29daeeffbn%40googlegroups.com.

[Hasnaa Mohamed]

Thank you for the warm welcome and for clarifying the repository structure, I'll make sure to refer to the specific packages moving forward to avoid confusion.
It's nice to meet you, Liam! As Daco mentioned, I'm ready to start contributing.
Quick update on my progress: I’ve successfully set up the ffigen environment using FVM on a Linux machine. While the Objective-C tests naturally fail/skip due to the Linux environment, I’ve verified the rest of the setup by running the header_parser tests, which are all passing.

Because I am working on Linux, I realized that Issues depends on ObjC might not be the best starting point for me. I would like to work on Issue #1546.
Is this issue still available? Or are there other specific tasks in ffigen or jnigen on your radar that you'd recommend for a new contributor?