nim-wiki/GSoC-2014-Ideas.md

# Introduction
Below is a list of project ideas for the 2014 GSoC Application for Nimrod. You will need to spend a considerable amount of time experimenting with the Nimrod programming language before you attempt these projects.

# Projects

## Compiler
**Add support for full coroutines**
  * Full coroutines in contrast to Nimrod's closure iterators can capture the full call stack.
  * Needs inline assembler to implement the stack switching.
  * The GC needs to support conservative marking of multiple stacks
  * In particular the write barrier in the GC which does the 'isOnStack' check needs to be changed.
  * Using a bloom filter for quick testing whether an address belongs to some stack is likely to pay off.
  * Creating a coroutine needs to register a new stack to the GC.
  * Deleting a coroutine needs to unregister the stack to the GC.
  * Builtin 'yld' must save the current stack pointer so that the GC knows which part of the stack is really in use.

**Fix bugs with iterators/generics**
**Fix/Expand Compiler as a Service features**

## Standard Library
**Integrate and expand new async io module**

**Enhance the filesystem monitoring module "fsmonitor.nim"**
  * Allow the fsmonitor module to work on Windows by using native api's to gather information about changes in monitored files and directories.
  * Revise the fsmonitor module api to decouple unix/linux file handle paradigms (such as using sockets.poll) from the api, allowing easier implementations of native backends.
  * Integrate the fsmonitor module's polling mechanism into the new asynchronous io modules.

**Add a cross-platform stat()-like procedure to the operating system module "os.nim"**
  * Implement a procedure which uses native stat-like calls on Linux, Mac, Windows, and other operating systems to gather detailed information about specific file system objects. Allow the bypassing of symlinks and hardlinks, where possible.

**Enhance and expand standard library documentation**
  * Ensure that documentation exists for all public methods and modules
  * Create and design new CSS and HTML layouts for the documentation, to better fit with the main website
  * Add search capabilities to the documentation

## Tools & Infrastructure
**Update and refactor nimrod builder**
  * Reduce the number of assumptions the nimrod builder makes about its host system, in order to reduce configuration restrictions. Assumptions include location and usage of external tools, such as git.

**Implement re2nim, a lexer generator for nimrod**
  * Model it after re2c or the Ragel state machine generator

**Implement a Nimrod backend for the Ragel state machine generator**
  * http://www.complang.org/ragel/