GCC GSoC 2021: Call for project ideas and mentors

[Martin Jambor]

Hello,

there have already been some inquiries from prospective students and so
I would like to start preparing for the next year of Google Summer of
Code now.  I'll be happy to volunteer to be the main Org Admin for GCC
again - so let me know if you think I shouldn't or that someone else
should, but otherwise I'll assume that I will.

First and foremost, I would like to ask all (moderately) seasoned GCC
contributors to consider mentoring a student this year and ideally also
come up with a project that they would like to lead.  I'm collecting
proposal on our wiki page https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode - feel
free to add yours to the top list there.  Or, if you are unsure, post
your offer and project idea as a reply here to the mailing list.


============ The following si different this year(!): ==================

Google has decided to cut the size of the projects by half, this year
the projects are supposed to take "175 hours over 10-week coding
period."  There will be only two evaluations.

While this offers much more flexibility to both mentors and students, I
am afraid It is not exactly good news for big and complex projects like
GCC because finding smaller projects is more difficult.  Also, students
will have to start their project prepared to begin working straight away
as they cannot be expected to use any of these hours to learn their way
around.  The coding period has also been shortened but is still
relatively long (June 7 - August 16).

See [1] for more on changes in the program this year.

========================================================================


Eventually, each listed project idea should have a) a project
title/description b) more detailed description of the project (2-5
sentences) c) expected outcomes d) skills required/preferred and e)
possible mentors [2].

Project ideas that come without an offer to also mentor them are always
fun to discuss, by all means feel free to reply to this email with yours
and I will attempt to find a mentor, but please be aware that we can
only use the suggestion it if we actually find one.

Everybody in the GCC community is invited to go over
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SummerOfCode and remove any outdated or
otherwise bad project suggestions and help improve viable ones which are
not yet viable.  I would especially want to ask libstdc++ people to do
so, and GFortran folk to check that their suggestions from last year are
still good.

Finally, please continue helping (prospective) students figure stuff out
about GCC like you always do.  So far I think all of them enjoyed
working with us, even if many sometimes struggled with GCC's complexity.

More information together with GSoC 2021 time line is available at
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

Thank you, let's hope we attract some young talent again this year.

Martin


[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/10/google-summer-of-code-2021-is-bringing.html
[2] https://google.github.io/gsocguides/mentor/defining-a-project-ideas-list