nim-wiki/GSoC-2014-Ideas.md

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# 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/