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: Redirecting to Google Groups

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