The applications have been reviewed, the results decided, and the applicants notified. Five coders will be participating in the 2021 edition of the Symmetry Autumn of Code, one of whom will be the first to take part in SAOC two times.
Following is a brief introduction to each participant and an equally brief summary of their projects. The project planning phase officially kicks off on September 1st, so any details I could provide from their applications would likely change by the time they finalize their initial milestones with their mentors. If you’re eager for more detail, please hold out a little while longer. The participants will start posting updates in the forums once their projects are underway. Their first updates should include more information.
Rethinking the default class hierarchy
If you followed SAOC 2020, you may recall that Robert Aron was a fourth-year student at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest who worked on implementing D client libraries for the Google APIs, along with a tool to generate client libraries for said APIs (all of which can be found in his GitHub repositories). He also was a recipient of the final SAOC payment (one of two last year, where usually we have only one) and is owed a free trip to a future real-world DConf.
Robert is now working toward an MSc in Security of Complex Networks at the same university, and he’s back with us for SAOC 2021. His project this time around is a DIP for and implementation of the ProtoObject concept that Eduard Staniloiu described in his DConf 2019 talk. This will set a ProtoObject class as the root class of D’s object hierarchy and the ancestor of the existing Object class. It will allow users to opt-in to features currently provided by default through Object, such as the inclusion of a monitor to support synchronization.
Once again, Robert will be working with Eduard Staniloiu and Razvan Nitu as his mentors.
Welcome back, Robert!
Replace DRuntime hooks with templates
Teodor Dutu is also at university in Bucharest working on a master’s degree in Advanced Cybersecurity. He has experience in C and Java, and it’s the low-level experience he gained working on projects like a file system, a kernel module, and an asynchronous HTTP server that he wants to apply toward improving the D ecosystem. The D language grabbed his interest when he participated in Razvan and Edi’s D Summer School, and he is eager to help out where he can.
To that end, Teodor is entering SAOC to work on a change to DRuntime. Currently, certain operations in user code are rewritten to call functions in the runtime known as runtime hooks (if you’ve ever seen a linker error mentioning something like _d_newArrayT or a symbol with a similar name, that was a runtime hook). There are some significant downsides to this approach, such as code bloat (the entire DRuntime library is linked in when linking statically), negative performance impact (due to the use of TypeInfo to pass runtime information to the hooks), and code that’s hard to maintain (the hooks are inserted at the IR level, a component of the compiler that’s difficult to understand).
Teodor’s plan is to replace each of the runtime hooks with templates. Dan Printzell already did some work on this, and Teodor will be following in his footsteps intending to take it all the way.
Eduard Staniloiu and Razvan Nitu will be Teodor’s mentors.
Implement support for D in LLVM Debugger (LLDB)
Luís Ferreira has extensive experience with C, C++, and D. He has contributed to DMD, DRuntime, and Phobos, and has a WIP implementation of DIP 1029 (Add throw as a Function Attribute) underway.
One of the projects Luís has been working on in his free time is a rewrite of DRuntime’s demangler to avoid exceptions, taken on because of his interest in mangling and demangling. He also has an interest in LLVM. The combination sparked the idea for his SAOC project. His rough goals for the project are to add support to LLDB for demangling D symbols, recognizing D-specific data structures, and parsing D expressions.
Mathias Lang has taken on the role of mentor for this project.
Light Weight DRuntime (LWDR)
Dylan Graham made waves on this blog when he wrote about the custom gearbox controller he built, using D for its firmware. That project led him to a new one: D needs a runtime that is suitable for embedded, Internet of Things, and real-time operating systems. That’s when he started work on LWDR.
You can see from that link that LWDR is not a port of DRuntime, but “a completely new implementation for low-resource environments”, and you’ll find a list of features that are currently supported. For SAOC, Dylan will be working on expanding feature support, shoring up what’s already there and adding new features along the way.
Dylan is a university student in Australia, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Computer Science through Monash University. He’s been programming since he was 11 years old, starting with C on the Arduino Uno and BASIC on the Maximite. His courses have exposed him to several other languages, and he has shown he’s a good hand with D.
His mentor for SAOC 2021 is Adam D. Ruppe.
Improve DUB: solve dependency hell
Ahmet Sait Koçak is a Computer Engineering student from Turkey. He has a strong background in C#, but considers D his second-most comfortable language. Some might be familiar with his work maintaining bindbc-harfbuzz.
For his SAOC project, he made use of our Projects repository and settled on the idea of solving the “dependency hell” problem that can arise when using DUB. Essentially, if library A depends on libraries B and C, which in turn depend on two different versions of library D, dub will error out without any effort to resolve the version conflict.
In reviewing the application, the judges identified some issues with the project as proposed, but it was still accepted with the understanding that Ahmet may need to take a different approach. His project subsequently gained the distinction of being the first SAOC project application discussed in a D Language Foundation meeting. The goal was to determine if there might be another way.
Ahmet’s mentor is Max Haughton, who was present for the meeting. He will be working with Ahmet to investigate the solution arrived at in the meeting and, if that proves infeasible, to move forward with the initial idea. Either way, you’ll hear the details from Ahmet in his weekly forum updates.
Onward!
The SAOC judges (Átila Neves, Robert Schadek, and John Colvin) were impressed with the quality of the applications this year and are eager to see how the projects turn out. Please keep an eye out for the weekly updates that should start arriving in the forums around September 22nd, a week after Milestone 1 begins. This will help you keep abreast of the progress of each project and also provide an opportunity for suggestions that might help our SAOC 2021 coders along their paths.
Milestone 1 kicks off on September 15th, and Milestone 4 will end on January 15th. The D Language Foundation and our sponsors, Symmetry Investments, wish these five coders well in all they do over those four months. Their success is the D community’s success, so we hope everyone will join us in ensuring they have all the support and help they need to get through their four milestones and see this thing through to the end.
