Google SoC

[Keith Duncan]

Hi

I read the email Lars posted to the cocoa-dev mailing list. I've read  
through your list of ideas and I'm interested in applying to work on  
the GNUstep project over the summer. I'm a Cocoa developer with  
experience writing server/client applications, standalone applications  
and frameworks. I also have experience maintaining my own open source  
framework Amber which I made public earlier this year at [http://code.google.com/p/amber-framework/ 
]. Admittedly the public repository has fallen somewhat behind that of  
my private repository. I've often consulted GNUstep implementations to  
get ideas for how best to tackle a problem myself, I think it's a  
brilliant resource and I would love to contribute to it.

Having read through your list of ideas I'm most interested in working  
on the CoreData implementation to gain a deeper understanding of the  
framework. I've also been thinking about ideas not on the list,  
something that I feel would be worthwhile would be updating the  
frameworks to include some of the latest Leopard additions, ensuring  
that other can continue to consult the framework implementations.  
Another idea I considered was attempting to implement an Objective-C  
2.0 compatible runtime, essentially revamping the runtime modeled on  
the work Apple has already done, though perhaps this is too great an  
undertaking for one person?

Before applying I would like to ask about the front/backend separation  
and to what extend it will influence the code I would be writing. As  
far as I can tell this applies only to drawing code, understandably  
the code needs to run on multiple platforms. I'm assuming the ideas I  
have discussed are in the domain of the frontend code, except maybe  
the new runtime implementation? The reason I ask is that I only have  
access to a 32 bit Intel Mac OS 10.5 development environment and as  
such, I wouldn't be able to test any WIN32 based backend. I do hope  
this doesn't preclude me from applying.

Looking forward to hearing from you shortly,
Keith