Student Projects at Google Summer of Code
April 22 announced the results of the selection of students within the Google Summer of Code . This was preceded by 4 tense weeks, during which the mentors familiarized themselves with the Fredkin paradox (the more two objects are similar to each other, the more difficult it is to make a choice between them) and its ultimate version - the Buridanov donkey paradox. This was due to the “interchangeability” of students who were equally well suited to two different network projects.
In the course of the last month, the team of mentors faced the following problems:
1) Google gave less slots than we requested (but more than 2 years ago);
2) some of the students did not do the test tasks;
3) for some students who completed test tasks, the code turned out to be of poor quality;
4) after March 25, many students stopped attending the forum and communicating with mentors;
5) some students applied to several organizations participating in Google Summer of Code at once, and therefore did not pay enough attention to the application to our organization;
6) several promising students from Russia refused to participate in the Google Summer of Code for their own reasons.
Five approved projects are presented in the table.
| Project | Programming language | Student country | Student's educational institution |
|---|---|---|---|
| GUI-based FTP client | Assembler (FASM) | India | BITS Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus |
| Torrent client | Assembler (FASM), wrappers for C libraries | India | International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad |
| Port PolarSSL | C -> Assembler (FASM) | Russia | National Research University Higher School of Economics |
| CPUID tool | Assembler (FASM) | USA | University of pittsburgh |
| C layer for KolibriOS | C, Assembler library wrappers (FASM) | Ukraine | National Aerospace University named after N.E. Zhukovsky |
Brief information about these projects:
1. GUI-based FTP client - creating an FTP client with a graphical interface, fixing errors in the protocol implementation and adding support for some FTP protocol commands, support for downloading files, and logging the history of actions.
2. Torrent client - creating (writing wrappers for the libraries of one of the cross-platform clients) a console version of the client that will download (decode a file, receive a list of peers, establish a connection with peers), distribute, process messages from the tracker and display statistics.
3. Port PolarSSL - port of the library for assembly language, including the writing of cryptographic algorithms and support for the TLS protocol.
4. CPUID_tool - updating the program so that it can identify processors released in the last 9 years, as well as determine the size of caches and supported functions.
5. C layer - writing C wrappers for the libraries box_lib, proc_lib, libini, libio, http, rasterworks, kmenu, libimg, libgfx, archive, buf2d, xml, libcrash.
Following Google’s decision, we’ll start preparing the infrastructure on our wiki, forum, and SVN for the GSOC on five projects.
The results of the first stage of the campaign:
1. We regard the 5 supported projects (slots) as success. Firstly, 20 applications were submitted for these 5 slots, i.e., the competition was 4 people per place, which made it possible to choose excellent students. Secondly, among 15 projects in the category "Operating Systems"we divided 9-10th place by the number of slots with Gentoo. Results in category:
- Debian Project (25)
- GNU Project (18)
- FreeBSD (15)
- The Linux Foundation (11)
- RTEMS Project (9)
- The NetBSD Foundation (7)
- openSUSE (6)
- Gentoo Foundation (5), KolibriOS (5)
- ReactOS (4), strace (4)
- coreboot (3), Netfilter project (3)
- Performance Co-Pilot (2).
PS Among the selected students for other projects there are also Russian-speaking students (and regulars of Habrahabr), whom we congratulate on this achievement. We also congratulate the friendly coreboot project, which finally managed to overcome many years of disagreement with the GSOC administration.