The verdict is in! Five programmers will be participating in the 2020 edition of the Symmetry Autumn of Code. Over the next three weeks, they will be working with their mentors to take the goals they outlined in their applications and turn them into concrete tasks across four milestones. Then, on September 15th, the first milestone gets under way.

Throughout the event, anyone can follow the progress of each project through the participants’ weekly updates in the General forum. Please don’t ignore those posts! You might be able to offer suggestions to help them along the way.

And now a little about the SAOC 2020 participants and their projects.

• Robert Aron is a fourth-year Computer Science student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. For his project, he’ll be implementing D client libraries for the Google APIs. When it’s complete, we’ll be able to interact with Google service APIs, such as GDrive, Calendar, Search, and GMail, directly from D. The goal is to complete the project by the end of the event.
• Michael Boston is currently developing a game in D. For his SAOC project, he’ll be taking some custom data structures he’s developed and adapting them to be more generic. The ultimate goal is to get Michael’s modified implementation merged into Phobos. Should that not happen, the library will still be part of the D ecosystem once it’s complete.
• Mihaela Chirea is a fourth-year Computer Engineering student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. Mihaela will spend SAOC 2020 improving DMD as a library. Part of this project will involve soliciting community feedback regarding proposed changes, so anyone interested in using DMD as a library should keep an eye out for Mihaela’s posts in the D forums.
• Teona Severin is a first-year master’s degree student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest who will be working on a mini DRuntime in order to bring D to low-performance microcontrollers based on ARM Cortex-M CPUs. Currently, D can run on such systems when compiled as -betterC, but the end goal of this project is to get enough of a functional DRuntime to write “a simple application that actively uses a class.“
• Adela Vais is yet another fourth-year Computer Engineering student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. For her project, she’ll be implementing a new D backend for GNU Bison. Currently, Bison has an experimental LALR1 parser for D. Adela’s implementation will be a GLR parser intended to overcome the limitations of the LALR1 parser.

The strong showing from Bucharest is down to the work of Razvan Nitzu and Eduard Staniloiu. They have introduced a number of students to the D programming language and encouraged them in seeking out projects beneficial both to their education and to the D community. Plus, Razvan and Edi will be participating in SAOC 2020 as mentors.

On behalf of the SAOC 2020 committee, the D Language Foundation, and Symmetry Investments, I want to thank everyone who submitted an application and wish the participants the best of luck in the coming months.