What's there to talk about? Well, people who will be eligible to participate may want to post here (you must be a student enrolled in college over the age of 18 to participate as a student). We could also go over ideas for what needs to be done.
Here is a list of project ideas I am aware of. I have been out of touch from Ecere for a few months, so some of the information below may be outdated:
- Refactor/rewrite the compiler. I think I'm speaking truthfully when I say that nobody (not even Jerome) really understands the compiler codebase as it stands. There's a lot of code repetition, and adding new features often involves adding code to all of the passes (a lot of that code is missing, too). Although refactoring the compiler is important for the future growth of Ecere, short-term deliverables should include a fix for the really slow compiles and a more rigorous specification of the eC language itself. As an added bonus, it would be nice to have cool new features like closures (nested functions that can access outside variables) and elegant plurals (ask sacrebleu about those). Advice: set rigid goals, and don't make promises you can't keep.
- Make Ecere work (natively) on 64-bit platforms. This primarily involves fixing code that acts like uint (4 bytes) can hold pointers (8 bytes on 64-bit), though you'll probably have to dig deep to uproot this problem.
- Make Ecere look nice. Ecere's current default skin looks like it's from 10 years ago (eligible students don't need to be told that ). Depending on the approach, Ecere's theme support code may need work. It would be nice to port themes like Clearlooks, Oxygen, etc. to Ecere, or draw up a theme manually. In my humble opinion, a good default theme will draw inspiration from the Ecere logo (grays and blues) while holding a lightweight yet modern appearance. Since I don't think you can get away with not coding much in GSoC, perhaps the goal should instead be "streamline the theme creation process". Such a goal might include implementing a GUI for theme editing.
Anyone else here eligible to participate in GSoC (as a student or mentor) or have project ideas?