Google Announces Summer of Code 2008

morrison writes "The 2008 Google Summer of Code is on. We have discussed this four-year-old tradition before (2005, 2006, 2007). Google will once again be hosting a program that gives computer science students a $4,500 stipend to work on open source software projects. Last year, Google funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries. As noted in the program FAQ, this year they hope to do even more. The #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode is already buzzing with activity."

Comments

Kids have it lucky these days

[PhrostyMcByte]

Granted pretty much nobody in high school will write quality code (even if they honestly think they do, like I once did), the chance to get paid experience and a mentor to help you improve is fantastic.

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[LetterRip]

Granted pretty much nobody in high school will write quality code (even if they honestly think they do, like I once did), the chance to get paid experience and a mentor to help you improve is fantastic.

Actually Nick Bishop who did SoC with Blender 2 years ago, and with Inkscape (I think?) last year, had pretty good code quality already as a high school student.

LetterRip

Re:Kids have it lucky these days

[Anonymous Coward]

It's college students, but not necessarily all CS majors.

Re:What should get precedence?

[mithro]

Thousand Parsec (a game framework for turn based strategy games) was one of the mentor organisations last year.

The effect on our project was really huge, not only did the students do some very cool work. We now have the creditability to approach Universities and help get their students involved with our project.

We already have one student working on Thousand Parsec as part of a high school internship and two students from the University of South Australia working on a Java MIDP client.

Thanks a huge amount to Google and the Summer of Code team, hopefully we can get in again this year and have even more fun!

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[katterjohn]

Are there ANY success stories?

Absolutely. My fellow SoC students and I participating with Nmap last year have lots of code in Nmap proper. And the years before that (Nmap has participated every year of the SoC) there were a whole lot of cool things added to Nmap proper from SoC work.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Enderandrew]

This is a bit of an urban legend at this point.

1 - Any complex app will likely have some memory leaks. The code has been very thoroughly examined and cleaned up for Firefox 3.
2 - Most "leaks" come from poorly written extensions/add-ons. Run without them and check out the difference.
3 - There is a feature in Firefox that you can easily turn off, that people mistake for a memory leak. Firefox keeps fully rendered versions of pages in memory, in addition to the standard cache on the hard disk. If you hit back, Firefox doesn't need to re-render the page. Browse a while, and Firefox will use up plenty of memory. If you don't like this behavior, then turn the feature off.

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[jesser]

I believe Firefox 3's implementations of resumable downloads and the APNG image format came from GSoC participants. The continued support of MathML in Firefox 3 may also be due in part to the work of a GSoC participant. We've also had a few not-so-successful GSoC projects.

Re:Have ANY projects been completed and integrated

[Fweeky]

Quite a few FreeBSD SoC projects make it into the system or ports, or at least had some of their work help with it; a quick glance at the SoC wiki pages I see enhancements to libalias and ipfw (I think some of this eventually made it; we now have kernel NAT with ipfw), bsnmpd bridge monitoring, FUSE port, gvinum enhancements, GEOM storage virtualisation, Apple hardware support enhancements, and what became the name service caching daemon.

Other things may not have made it in, but were good research projects both for the project and for the students; FreeBSD now has a very functional port of OpenBSD's hardware sensors suite, though it wasn't accepted into base because of architectural concerns. gjournal started life as a SoC project, and while rejected it did help spur development of a new more functional one, and the student went on to produce gvirstor, the aforementioned GEOM storage virtualisation layer which *did* make it. The Linux KVM port got far enough to boot FreeBSD 7 as a guest and will hopefully continue development. I'm sure I've left lots out.

Just because a SoC project doesn't make it into a "product", doesn't mean that project wasn't a success. Even if it never produces something deployable, it's given a student some experience in development, it's given the project some interesting if not necessarily immediately useful code and it's helped lay groundwork for future development, even if it only does so by providing those concerned some experience.

Re:Check out Gladex

[ricegf]

You can connect signals and handle events, everything you can do with generated or self-written GTK+ code.

The one very important thing you can do with generated code that you can't do with a 4-line call to libglade is customize the code. A library can't do everything custom code can do, though good libraries seem to cover 80-90% of the most common use cases. For many applications, the libraries do everything you need. For everything else, you'd like to generate the commonplace code from your glade design and then customize the small portions that are unique.

Quick introduction for those thinking of applying

[morrison]

BZFlag participated in the Google Summer of Code for the first time in 2007. Our participation was documented in this detailed article (Warning: 15 MB PDF).

Another higher-level summary was put together for a presentation and is available here (Warning: 5 MB PDF)

See the presentation for the quick introduction. I highly recommend the article to any students and projects/mentors that are seriously thinking about participating for the first time.

On the whole, it's a great opportunity for projects but you do have to put in a lot of time and effort. You have to have your act together. If you do, the students and the projects will both have a great time.

Re:What should get precedence?

[Mandrake]

actually, that is not true. in fact, X allocates pixmaps for drawing to the screen most of what you're displaying in firefox - many of which are in subwindows of the main firefox application. X is allocating memory for the application, in other words. if not freed properly (due to, say, potential bugs in this person's X server) this can, in fact, cause memory to leak that lasts beyond the termination of the actual application (firefox).