Project suggestions for the 2006 GHC hackathon

See also FridayIdeas - someone should combine these lists :)

Add your suggestions for the hackathon below...

GHC Projects

• Hack to allow RTS to integrate with an external event loop (eg to give us ideal threading when using Gtk+)

• Add a ghc --clean that just executes find -name '*.o' -o -name '*.hi' -exec rm {} \;, perhaps in a more portable fashion

• Further work on debugging in GHCi

• Improve the native code generator: see BackEndNotes

• Get the front panel working again (#599)

• WARNING pragma (#657)

• Warning suppression (#602)

• Accept more encodings for source code (#690)

• Use gcc's libffi to implement Adjustor.c & ByteCodeFFI

• Add :edit support to GHCi (#95)

• Option to allow compiling from within GHCi (#276)

• GHC plugins: allow passes to be loaded at runtime from plugins

• Get shared libraries or DLLs working

• Build a Windows-native version of GHC (using MS tools instead of gcc).

• GHC API clients: hstags, code metrics (eg. feature use)

• Implemene the static argument transformation (#888)

• Whole-program dead-code detection (with --make).

• Whole-program overloading elimination (with --make).

• Work on Haddock on top of the GHC API (see  this message).

• -Ofile: take the list of optimisation passes to run from a file instead of current hard-wired sequence.

• -fmonad-comprehension: Reuse existing list comprehension code to restore it for arbitrary monads.

• Improve the profiler (longer stacks reported while heap profiling, for example)

• Add type parameter to HsSyn for the post-typechecking type to ensure it does not exist until after typechecking

• Improve pretty-printer for Core to have better layout -- Geoff Washburn may look at this.

• Improve instance deriving: allow deriving Enum for more types, allow deriving Eq, Ord, Show for GADTs. -- Bjorn Bringert

• Hacking the build system (for example)
• Setting up GHC to build the base library using Cabal (since you have the GHC team, the Cabal team and the hmake team in one place!)
  • Isaac Jones - I can be available for general Cabal questions as well.
• Hacking on Cabal-Get (not really a GHC thing!)
  • Isaac Jones
• Fix C-- (cmm) output?
• Resuscitate ExternalCore
• Low hanging optimizations?
• STGLint
• Rewrite the Evil Mangler in Haskell?
• GHC RTS in Cyclone?
• Work on GHC API, I would like to use it to provide feedback and interactivity to programmers
• Hook a multithreaded memory manager into the RTS

Library Projects

• Work on the Streams library

• Replace GMP with OpenSSL mp library (#601)

• A binding for your favourite C/C++ library... (eg. GStreamer?)

Cabal Projects

• Cabalisation of the GHC library (#654)

• Put two solid days of work into getting cabal-get finished and stable. Additionally, put as many packages into the DB as possible.

More Project Suggestions

• Generate Windows installers automatically from Cabal packages (or other OS-specific package format, eg. RPM)

• Any of the bugs, tasks, or feature requests.

• Guarantee that .hi files and .o files are consistent, possibly by means of some sort of digital signature that would cause a link-time failure

• A visualizer that would allow one to step forward and backward through the transformations that the compiler is doing (instead of crawling through endless outputs of -ddump-*).