GSOC-2015 Completed Ninia starter tasks

[Rukshan Viduranga Perera]

Hi PLASMA developers,

 I am a second year undergraduate from University of Moratuwa - Sri Lanka studying Computer Science and Engineering. I am really passionate about Open source but so far

I haven't been able to contribute. I think GSOC-2015 will be the door for me to enter into  Open source world.

I managed to find a bug on Ninia project, not exactly a bug but which not yet implemented because I see that Ninia is following TDD.

This is my pr,

  https://github.com/plasma-umass/Ninia/pull/8

 waiting for feedback to fix.. Still ranges like range(-10,-1,-1) won't process correctly and I really think where I put the test file is not appropriate. Waiting for other GSOC contributor

to make the 'builtin' folder.

I would like to contribute to this project for GSOC 2015 and although I get selected for GSOC-2015 or not I would like to contribute to this project to make it better. 

I really like to know, what would be better to do next in order qualify further for Ninia project which will satisfy PLASMA to select me ?

[John Vilk]

Hey Rukshan,

Thanks for the pull request! We always appreciate bug fixes and bug reports. We want Ninia to run as much Python code as possible. so any bug fixes or features that move us forward in compatibility with CPython is greatly appreciated.

> what would be better to do next in order qualify further for Ninia project which will satisfy PLASMA to select me ?

There are a couple of things you can do:

• Find further bugs or missing functionality in Ninia, and fix them. There are quite a lot of them, as it's an early project! We're missing certain bytecode implementations, other parts of the byte code are incomplete, and there are comments in various places that describe limitations that should be fixed.
• Start thinking about our application questions. During the application period, I will be happy to provide some feedback on your application: https://github.com/plasma-umass/GSoC/wiki/Application-Template

Ultimately, we are looking for students that are able to work in and understand medium-size software like Ninia. The project involves changing how Ninia's python "thread" works, so you will need to understand how Ninia's Python control flow works to complete the project (function calls / return statements / branches / etc). I wrote up a response to Mustafa that explains the ultimate goal of the project:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/plasma-umass-gsoc/BJpHk_Y0EYs

If you are not selected for GSoC, we will still happily accept your code changes to Ninia, and work with you to fix them if they have issues. :)

Let me know if you have any further questions!

John