Google Summer of Code™ 2009 (GSoC) was filled with fresh faces and exciting new projects for
The Perl Foundation (TPF). As I write this, we are currently in the final stage of the summer
where students submit evidence of their work in a zip/tar.gz file by uploading it to a publicly viewable repository. I very much like that now anyone on the 'net can download a file containing the entire summer of work by the student, and there is even a download count next to each file for each student!
We started the summer with nine students, but Kevin Tew was not able to work on "
A prototype LLVM JIT runcore for Parrot" in the program due to external issues. He is still a core
Parrot Virtual Machine developer and I hope that he can find time to work on this awesome project some time in the near future. Since Parrot is currently
redesigning its JIT framework from the ground up, a project similar to this would be great for next year.
The
other Parrot VM project was
Daniel Arbelo Arrocha working on "
Decimal Arithmetic: BigInt, BigNum and BigRat for parrot" with Christoph Otto as a mentor. Big Decimal Arithmetic basically means storing arbitrary large/arbitrary precision numbers internally in a decimal format rather than the binary format usually used. Doing this can prevent catastrophic rounding errors. If you can store numbers internally with exactly NO error, then obviously this is A Very Good Thing. Daniel worked on making dynamic PMC's (Polymorphic Parrot Classes, or Parrot Magic cookies, take your pick) which wrap the mature and extensive
IBM's libdecnumber library. What this means is that Parrot can do arithmetic on arbitrarily large integers (BigInt's) or floating point numbers with arbitrary precision (BigNum's.) Financial people are very interested in these as well, since no one wants to be short-changed on their interest due to rounding error. Daniel has also been contributing patches to many other parts of Parrot and will probably be getting a commit bit soon, which is great news to hear.
Devin Austin worked on "
Refactoring Catalyst helper modules", with Kieren Diment as a mentor. This involved some "Moosification", which means refactoring home-rolled object-oriented code to use
Moose (the post-modern Perl 5 object system), i.e. less code to maintain and more features at your fingertips.
I am excited to talk about our next student, who worked on a
Perl 6-related project.
Carl Mäsak mentored
Hinrik Örn Sigurðsson on "Perl 6 End-User Documentation Tools" (
github repo) . Hinrik is working on the
grok command, which is the Perl 6 relative of
perldoc. With it, you can get documentation for Perl 6 functions from the spec, read the Synopses and Apocalypses, and occasionally attain temporary enlightenment. If you have a properly installed CPAN client on your computer, you can install it with cpan
App::Grok.
Our other exciting Perl 6 project was Paweł Murias working on "Multimethods for SMOP", mentored by Daniel Ruoso, the lead developer of SMOP. SMOP stands for Simple Meta Object Programming (or Simple Matter of Programming, if you are feeling snarky) and it is an implementation of Perl 6, a sister of
Rakudo. Multimethods, short for Multiple Method Dispatch, is a feature where a language can determine which variant of a set of functions to call, based on the type of their arguments. One way that this becomes very powerful is that you can use wildcard arguments when you declare your multimethod, so you can essentially write many functions at once. Less code to maintain is a big WIN ! Paweł's code is being directly merged into the mainline SMOP codebase and from what I hear, he is and will continue to be a core contributor. That is what GSoC is all about. That and free t-shirts.
State Transitions in Mojo::Pipeline
Pascal Gaudette worked on "
HTTP/1.1 Compliance Testing and User-Agent Development for the Mojo Web Framework" with mentor Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi. This is important because
Mojo, one of the newest and most exciting Perl Web frameworks did not have much testing for acting correctly according to HTTP/1.1 . Part of the work of this summer has become the CPAN module
MojoX::UserAgent. He has a great blog post about "
State Transitions in Mojo" wherein he explains how Mojo deals with state and generated some pretty cool transition diagrams by documenting when a state transition happens in the test suite and then feeding this data into
Graph::Easy.
WebKit has become often-forked and very influential open source browser engine, so it is no surprise that Perl hackers want bindings to it.
Ryan Jendoubi worked on "
Cross-platform Perl Bindings for wxWebKit" with mentor Michael Peters, which allows WebKit and
WxWigdets, a cross platform GUI library, to talk to each other via
wxWebKit. I think this was one of the more difficult projects this year, not because of the programming/algorithms involved, but because it requires getting lots of cross-platform, constantly-changing and fickle pieces of software to get along with each other. This is often like inviting zebras and lions to the same party. Messy and dangerous. But Ryan prevailed and we give him much respect and hope that he continues to maintain and improve the
Wx::WebKit bindings.
I had the pleasure of mentoring
Robert (Bob) Kuo this summer on his work entitled "
Implement BPSW algorithm as a Perl 5 CPAN module, Math::Primality with extensive test-suite." The
Math::Primality module is already on CPAN and I am glad to announce that Bob is listed as co-maintainer and published the latest release. This module is important because the Perl 5 Cryptography CPAN modules (mostly in the Crypt::* namespace) have one, very large, very fragile dependency, called
Math::Pari. Math::Pari is an amazing library that gives Perl access to the extensive state-of-the-art number theory library PARI, but to attain ultimate speed, Math::Pari pokes into undocumented internal-only Perl core internals, which means that changes to Perl internals that *shouldn't* have any effect on the outside world can cause the entire Crypt::* namespace to break. Also, most of the Crypt::* namespace require only 5-10 functions from Math::Pari, which provides an interface to thousands of functions. Math::Primality implements the few prime-checking (primality) functions that Crypt::* modules want from Math::Pari in a small, easy-to-maintain, pure-Perl CPAN module. Bob implemented the
BPSW algorithm, a state of the art prime-number checking algorithm which allows you to check if an arbitrarily large number is prime in O( log(n) ) i.e.
logarithmic running time. It is actually a combination of very different prime number checks, which weed out different types of non-prime numbers. So far, no one has found a counter-example to the BPSW algorithm (even though
those pesky mathematicians say there probably are), so it is the best out there currently. It is estimated that because no one has seen this algorithm fail yet, and it being used extensively from within other algorithms, that the first counter-example must be at least 10,000 decimal digits long! Future steps for this module will be to work on its sister module,
Math::Factoring, which implements the remaining factoring-related functions that Crypto modules want and then use both modules as new dependencies for the Crypt:: namespace, instead of Math::Pari.
Justin Hunter was mentored by Ash Berlin on the project "SQL::Translator Rewrite" (
github repo). SQL::Translator is a very popular CPAN module for translating various "flavors" of SQL to and from each other, such as Postgres to MySQL. This involved more "Moosification", as described above. Justin also has some advice for hopeful GSoC students:
- Get over yourself.
- Understand there are people smarter than you or people better at some things than you.
- Just the same, you're still needed.
- Just Go Ahead and Do It and find your niche.
I wish someone had told me that about 10 years ago. I would not have wasted a lot of time worrying that people would think I was stupid and starting diving into Open Source projects much more earnestly.
In total, we had a success rate of 8/9 = 88.8%, just a bit above
this year's all time high of 85%. Please join me in congratulating all these students and mentors for their top-notch work ! I can honestly say that I had much fun interacting with so many corners of the Perl community. This was my first year being an organization administrator, I learned a lot by my favorite method: sink or swim. I was handed over the magic rocket-powered surf board by Eric Wilhelm after successfully mentoring Thierry Moisan last year on the Math::GSL CPAN module. Organizing and communicating with people spread across a dozen time zones is definitely an art that I am still mastering. I think using as many mediums as possible to communication with people is key. I already use chat, email and IRC, but I wish I had done voice/skype and/or video chat with some of my students and mentors, so that everyone has a face to attach to a name.
I would also like to thank
Jerry Gay for being The Perl Foundation co-pilot this year and welcoming me into the Parrot community. Your guidance in certain matters went a long way.
For anyone that would like to help/be involved in
Google Summer of Code with The Perl Foundation next year, we cordially invite you to our IRC channel, #soc-help on
irc.perl.org, and the
mailing list.
By Jonathan Leto, Google Summer of Code Mentor and Organization Administrator
Today, we are open sourcing the Postini EZCommand Shell, a Perl script allowing Postini administrators to issue EZCommands to Postini from a command line.
