Hi all,

there was some discussion about possible Summer of Code topics on the
#pypy channel today. We had several project ideas:

 - work on the JIT assembler backends. There are several possible
   projects here, like writing a much simpler i386 backend and adding
   float support to that; or writing a x64 backend; or writing a new
   i386 backend that uses the more modern bits of the processor for
   arithmetic (like SSE and friends).

 - support ctypes on more backends. right now ctypes is supported only
   when compiling PyPy to C. A nice project would be to support it when
   compiling to .NET. That's not too hard, the only thing needed is to
   port a small module that does the actual invocation of external
   libraries (a related project would be to port this module to Jython
   or IronPython to get support for ctypes there).

 - support some of the more recent features of CPython. A nice project
   would be to support all of the remaining CPython 2.5 features and
   port over the changes to the standard library (which includes
   re-writing some of the C-coded modules in RPython or pure Python).
   Another possibility would be to even start looking into the 2.6
   features.

 - Anto proposed to make the javascript backendopt more useful by
   turning it into something more frameworkish. I am sceptical of the
   viability of the task, it would need a very clever student and
   probably a lot of work too.

What do you all think of these ideas? Are there other ideas around? I
know that Jakub posted something a while ago (haven't looked in detail
yet, though). In my opinion we should try to avoid "yet another
incomplete interpreter implentation" for this year.

The timeplan is to collect some more ideas, then write a better
description of them and make a blog post about it (say around Thursday).
Sounds like a plan?

Cheers,

Carl Friedrich
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