[Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Yotam Barnoy]

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Dear List

Are there plans to apply for GSOC mentorship this year? Searching online
yielded only a rejected application from 2011. Applications for mentor
organizations are due February 14th.

-Yotam

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Re: [Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Adrien Nader]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
> Dear List
> 
> Are there plans to apply for GSOC mentorship this year? Searching online
> yielded only a rejected application from 2011. Applications for mentor
> organizations are due February 14th.

Then, if nothing has been started yet, it's probably already too late.
GSoC is fairly constraining and time-consuming. Nowadays, projects which
manage to do it have actually gotten experienced at it and this makes it
more difficult for new participants: they don't only have to do things
well, they have to do things better than projects which have been doing
it for 10 years.

There's also a feeling that Google doesn't care about what happens in
OCaml-land (that's mostly speculation).

I believe it might be worth trying again. Many things have changed and
the projects that could be worked on now might appeal more to the GSoC
organizers. That would be for 2015 in my opinion though.

Regards,
Adrien Nader

Re: [Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Nicolas Braud-Santoni]

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On 15/01/2014 10:04, Adrien Nader wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
>> Dear List
>>
>> Are there plans to apply for GSOC mentorship this year? Searching online
>> yielded only a rejected application from 2011. Applications for mentor
>> organizations are due February 14th.
> Then, if nothing has been started yet, it's probably already too late.
> GSoC is fairly constraining and time-consuming. Nowadays, projects which
> manage to do it have actually gotten experienced at it and this makes it
> more difficult for new participants: they don't only have to do things
> well, they have to do things better than projects which have been doing
> it for 10 years.
>
> There's also a feeling that Google doesn't care about what happens in
> OCaml-land (that's mostly speculation).
I don't believe that Google (as a company) cares about Tor, yet the Tor
project has been a mentoring organization since 2007.
However, I have to agree that it is probably too late to prepare a
(solid) application.

> I believe it might be worth trying again. Many things have changed and
> the projects that could be worked on now might appeal more to the GSoC
> organizers. That would be for 2015 in my opinion though.
I completely agree.


Kind regards,
Nicolas


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Re: [Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Yotam Barnoy]

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I actually don't think it's very hard to apply (in general). The
requirements page is here (
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2014/help_page?ModPagespeed=noscript#1._How_does_a_mentoring_organization).
It's certainly much easier than applying for a grant.

Having participated as a mentor in another organization, and having seen
the application process every year, I can say that the main part is coming
up with a webpage full of ideas for projects. I think that already exists
partially on the ocamllabs wiki. I'd really like to see that wiki be
centralized and available from the ocaml.org site. The key thing is to
figure out which projects are doable by people in one summer. The next step
is that people need to volunteer for mentorship. Even 2 people are enough
for a start, but 3-4 are better. Finally, one person takes on the process
of filling out the application and submitting it.

One of the things that concern google, as can be seen in the webpage, is
that there's enough effort from the mentors to
a. weed out the poor candidates and
b. be in touch with/demand enough from the candidates to make sure that
they're actually working and not just slacking off for the summer. In my
old organization, the participants had to post blog updates every week or
so about their progress.

Other than that, there's not much to it.

-Yotam



On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
> > Dear List
> >
> > Are there plans to apply for GSOC mentorship this year? Searching online
> > yielded only a rejected application from 2011. Applications for mentor
> > organizations are due February 14th.
>
> Then, if nothing has been started yet, it's probably already too late.
> GSoC is fairly constraining and time-consuming. Nowadays, projects which
> manage to do it have actually gotten experienced at it and this makes it
> more difficult for new participants: they don't only have to do things
> well, they have to do things better than projects which have been doing
> it for 10 years.
>
> There's also a feeling that Google doesn't care about what happens in
> OCaml-land (that's mostly speculation).
>
> I believe it might be worth trying again. Many things have changed and
> the projects that could be worked on now might appeal more to the GSoC
> organizers. That would be for 2015 in my opinion though.
>
> Regards,
> Adrien Nader
>
>
>

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RE: [Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Jon Harrop]

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Ø  I can say that the main part is coming up with a webpage full of ideas
for projects.

 

If anyone wants to pursue anything like HLVM, please do get in touch with
me.

 

I’ve been discussing student projects recently and a couple of ideas I’ve
had are:

 

1.       Merge core (stdlib) collections with the GC. For example, mutable
stacks and queues are currently represented as arrays filled with NULL
pointers whereas a collection-aware GC could skip the unreachable pointers
and the collection wouldn’t have to NULL out its elements. Collections could
also be shrunk by the GC.

2.       Allow objects to morph their representation as they go from one
generation to another. For example, long-lived immutable sets could morph
from a tree of heap-allocated blocks into a sorted array.

 

I also think it would be interesting to study how fast purely functional
data structures could be if their representation was optimized (within the
confines of a memory-safe VM) for the performance characteristics of a naïve
mark-sweep GC. For example, list cons in OCaml currently heap allocates a
new block based on the assumption that the GC can do this quickly (which
OCaml can) but the list implementation could pre-allocate a block of cons
cells in an array and use a CAS to claim the next one, amortising
allocations and greatly reducing the stress on the GC. I’ve implemented this
for lists in F# where it is about as fast as the generational GC. I don’t
know if the same can be done effectively for trees like Set and Map. The
motivation is avoiding the pathological performance for programs that
violate the generational hypothesis.

 

Cheers,

Jon.

 

From: caml-list-request@inria.fr [mailto:caml-list-request@inria.fr] On
Behalf Of Yotam Barnoy
Sent: 15 January 2014 15:24
To: Adrien Nader
Cc: Ocaml Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Google summer of code

 

I actually don't think it's very hard to apply (in general). The
requirements page is here
(http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc20
14/help_page?ModPagespeed=noscript#1._How_does_a_mentoring_organization).
It's certainly much easier than applying for a grant.

Having participated as a mentor in another organization, and having seen the
application process every year, I can say that the main part is coming up
with a webpage full of ideas for projects. I think that already exists
partially on the ocamllabs wiki. I'd really like to see that wiki be
centralized and available from the ocaml.org site. The key thing is to
figure out which projects are doable by people in one summer. The next step
is that people need to volunteer for mentorship. Even 2 people are enough
for a start, but 3-4 are better. Finally, one person takes on the process of
filling out the application and submitting it.

One of the things that concern google, as can be seen in the webpage, is
that there's enough effort from the mentors to 
a. weed out the poor candidates and 
b. be in touch with/demand enough from the candidates to make sure that
they're actually working and not just slacking off for the summer. In my old
organization, the participants had to post blog updates every week or so
about their progress.

Other than that, there's not much to it.

-Yotam

 

 

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org> wrote:

Hi,


On Tue, Jan 14, 2014, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
> Dear List
>
> Are there plans to apply for GSOC mentorship this year? Searching online
> yielded only a rejected application from 2011. Applications for mentor
> organizations are due February 14th.

Then, if nothing has been started yet, it's probably already too late.
GSoC is fairly constraining and time-consuming. Nowadays, projects which
manage to do it have actually gotten experienced at it and this makes it
more difficult for new participants: they don't only have to do things
well, they have to do things better than projects which have been doing
it for 10 years.

There's also a feeling that Google doesn't care about what happens in
OCaml-land (that's mostly speculation).

I believe it might be worth trying again. Many things have changed and
the projects that could be worked on now might appeal more to the GSoC
organizers. That would be for 2015 in my opinion though.

Regards,
Adrien Nader



 


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Re: [Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Although we didn't apply directly from OCaml, I thought I'd point out two 
projects that have been accepted that do use OCaml.

- MirageOS; a unikernel written in OCaml that compiles to specialised kernels.
  Because a Mirage app is functorized across its OS dependencies, it's possible
  to port it to rather exotic targets such as JavaScript, while maintaining the
  same module interfaces.  Tips and ideas for Mirage available here:
  http://openmirage.org/blog/applying-for-gsoc2014

- Frenetic is a family of network programming languages that let you control
  your network via software defined interfaces.  Ideas for it are up at:
  https://github.com/frenetic-lang/frenetic/wiki/GSoC-2014-Project-Ideas

There may be others here that I haven't spotted:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2014

I'd highly recommend any students who have a spare summer coming up to
apply.  Bonus points for any brave souls that propose combining Frenetic
and MirageOS into an OCaml monster that will take over the Internet :-)

-anil

On 14 Jan 2014, at 23:04, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear List
> 
> Are there plans to apply for GSOC mentorship this year? Searching online yielded only a rejected application from 2011. Applications for mentor organizations are due February 14th.
> 
> -Yotam

Re: [Caml-list] Google summer of code

[Marco Canini]

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>
> I'd highly recommend any students who have a spare summer coming up to
> apply.  Bonus points for any brave souls that propose combining Frenetic
> and MirageOS into an OCaml monster that will take over the Internet :-)
>
>
LOL

In any case, that'd be an interesting project to combine Frenetic with
MirageOS.

-Marco

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