JRuby's Google Summer of Code 2013!

Hello, friends!

I’m pleased to announce that JRuby will be participating in this year’s
Google Summer of Code! We’re looking for students and mentors to help
work
on JRuby (and Ruby) related projects (and get paid doing it, of course).

We have an ideas page here:

The JRuby GSoC mailing list for interested students and mentors is here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/jruby-gsoc

If you won’t or can’t be a student or mentor, I hope you will pass this
information on to others. There’s a lot of great opportunities for
improving JRuby and Ruby in general that can all fall under our GSoC
umbrella.

Here’s a few short ideas from the wiki:

  • Rails performance - work on assembling small to large-scale benchmarks
    for Rails (general Ruby) and then help us identify areas that need
    improvement (JRuby).

  • RubySpec - fill out specs for Ruby 1.9 and 2.0 features that are
    weakly
    covered (general Ruby) and/or help us improve JRuby’s pass rate on
    existing
    and new specs (JRuby).

  • Rework JRuby build/dist process - What we have today is a bit of a
    mess,
    combining several tools and requiring too many manual steps. We’d like
    to
    automate more and simplify the process in general (JRuby).

  • Port extensions to JRuby - There are still many C extensions that have
    no
    equivalent in JRuby. Research what popular extensions are not supported
    and
    work to write JRuby implementations of them (JRuby).

  • Shoooooes! - Shoes is now largely JRuby-based, so there’s lots of
    opportunities to improve how Shoes behaves and performs on JRuby.

  • JRuby’s new IR compiler - For JRuby 9000 (working name of the next
    major
    JRuby version) we will be using a new compiler already in progress. Help
    us
    write the JVM backend for that compiler along with optimization passes,
    static and dynamic analysis, and so on. Fun with compilers. (JRuby)

  • krypt replacements for OpenSSL - krypt is a new Ruby-targeted library
    for
    crypto that has the potential to eliminate Ruby’s dependence on OpenSSL.
    Work to fill out krypt to cover more OpenSSL use cases (general Ruby)
    and
    help us wire it into JRuby to eliminate our OpenSSL-like library
    (JRuby).

And there’s much more. Please jump on the mailing list, talk to us on
IRC,
ping me on Twitter (@headius) or contact us some other way if you or
someone you know would be interested in being a mentor or student!

It’s going to be a great summer for Ruby!

  • Charlie