Re: Self introduction, GSoC 2017

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

On 03/13/2017 12:58 PM, Vasantha Ganesh wrote:
> Hello all,
>   I am Vasantha Ganesh Kanniappan. I am a free software enthusiast. I
> am doing my Bachelors in Computer Science Engineering from Amrita
> School of Engineering, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India.

Welcome!

> I am interested in working on `Easier Access to Native Libraries using JNA/JNR'.

Cool.  Note I haven't used JNA or JNI myself, so we'd have to learn it together.

> Appropriate skill set:
> I am a languages guy. I have tried to write a parser for subset python
> with bison and flex (https://github.com/vasanthaganeshk/pymirchi). I
> have written a toy JVM. I used Javassist for parsing the bytecode. The
> JVM supported 26 op-codes and I used reflection library for calling
> builtin functions. The JVM was capable of doing some basic arithmetic
> and some printing. I did it as a learning exercise. The code is here
> (https://github.com/vasanthaganeshk/orange-virtual-machine). I took
> SICP course from my school and learnt scheme on the way. I used Guile
> scheme for solving the exercises. I learnt Java while writing the JVM.
> I'm a functional programmer, I started out with Scheme and then jumped
> to Haskell and I've used it for some time. I've taken a course in
> Operating systems and I familiarized myself with some syscalls while
> working on a Game Engine for an AI-Challenge
> (https://github.com/arrow-/phoenix) for my University.

That seems good.
> What I've done:
> -> I forked and cloned Kawa.
> -> I compiled it from source and ran the tests (master branch)
> -> I tried to setup CI for Kawa and I'm getting some errors with make

Oops. I checked in a fix for this.

> (I learnt to use Docker for one of my projects and that was useful for
> setting up CI).
> -> I wrote hello world program in Kawa
> -> I cloned the jnr-posix repo and generated docs(I've not read them yet).
> -> I read the TODO page.
>
> Things that I have to learn:
> -> To use ant.
> -> To use Autotools (I've written Makefiles for my previous projects though)
> -> Writing docs with texi (I've been using MarkDown for everything)

You don't necessarily need to learn all of these to work on Kawa :-)

> -> To read docs for JNA and JNR.
> -> To read Kawa docs.
>
> Please help me with the following:
>
> I encountered some errors while trying to run `make'
> (https://gitlab.com/vasanthaganeshk/Kawa/builds/12132613)

Fixed.

> I need some docs telling what each directory contains and some
> interesting files that I have to read. Probably I've missed it here
> (https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/ToC.html).

Kawa is big and sprawling, based on 20+ years of development, and not
everything is in a logical place.

> Before writing the proposal I would like to make contributions to get
> familiarized with the repo.

That makes sense.
> From the TODO page `Remove pretty-print implementation in slib.'
> seemed like the easiest. I do not know if this issue still exists but
> if it does then it should exist in `Kawa/gnu/kawa/slib/testing.scm'.

I'm not sure how useful this is i terms of leaning the code-base, but it's
a start.  There is a non-trivial amount of work in terms of learning the
slib implementation, the native PrettyWriter.java implementation, and
how to re-implement the slib function using PrettyWriter.java.

> I think I can also work on this `Compiler should use class-file
> reading instead of reflection', but I have to read the docs for that.
> If that is solved to, please suggest me some trivial tasks to get
> started with.

It's probably to big for a familiarization exercise, plus I'm not
sure how useful it is.

One mini-project to consider is "Optional strict typing along with an
explicit dynamic type" if viewed as more exploration than a project.
Basically you'd add a --strict-typing flag, and have that change
the behavior of the checkType method InlineCalls.

Basically:

   if ((isStrictTyping() ? cmp <= 0 : cmp < 0)
       ...

and then see what happens.  Perhaps write a blog article about what you find.
You may need to to change the type default type (for parameters and
other declarations that don't have TYPE_SPECIFIED) from  Type.objectType
to LangObjType.dynamicType.

I don't know how workable or useful a --strict-typing flag would be,
but would be an interesting experiment, a good learning experience,
and without requiring too much time or knowledge.  I hope.

--
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/