How would *you* use an intern?

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

We were fortunate enough to get a summer intern this year; he just
started yesterday and is currently immersing himself in the mysteries
of GCC (he already has some hacking experience with OS X).  We still
need to decide what he should work on though.

I've looked through the "projects for beginners" list, and while
there are lots of interesting items, I was hoping for something
that would help GCC be more useful with IDEs.  For instance, an
easy thing might be to add some sort of structure to GCC's errors
and warnings, perhaps something like GDB's MI interface or some
sort of XML format, since Apple's IDE already uses XML for its
project files.

A more radical change that we were thinking about was to make GCC
reentrant in some fashion, so you could have multiple incremental
compiles going on behind the scenes, but not be thrashing the
machine by bringing up cc1 executables up and down all the time.
So GCC becomes a sort of compile server, taking big and little
compilation tasks from the IDE.  To do something like that, you'd
want to gather up globals into some sort of compile state that
could be per-thread.  The idea for the intern's task was to start
the task of changing random globals into structures, which doesn't
require deep knowledge of GCC internals.

Anyway, before launching him on one of these, I thought I'd see if
there were other similar projects that people had in mind.  Ideally,
the project should be relevant to something Apple is doing, doable
within a couple months, involve some coding in GCC proper, and be
something that can be added to FSF GCC if it's of sufficient quality.

Ideas?

Stan