Google's Summer of Code 2008 is wrapping up now and I'm very pleased with how well The Perl Foundation's students and mentors have done. The five projects which survived the halfway point have all finished with great results.
Many thanks to all of the mentors and students as well as everyone in the community who helped or supported the process. Also, thanks to Google for putting on the program and to Richard Dice and Jim Brandt at TPF.
But the end is only the beginning. We should really get started on next year now. Perl needs to do a better job of attracting students, but I'll have to address these issues in another post.
Most of the students did a great job of blogging their progress, which I think is an important part of Summer of Code for the rest of the community. If you have been following along with any of the student projects, please drop me a note or leave a comment. I would love to hear more opinions from outside of the active SoC participants. Also, please thank the mentors and students for their work. Of course, they "know" you appreciate their effort -- but it really means something if you actually send them an e-mail or say thanks on irc.
For those just joining us, here is a run-down of the SoC projects and some links.
Flesh out the Perl 6 Test Suite
student: Adrian Kreher
mentor: Moritz Lenz
Blog | Code
wxCPANPLUS
student: Samuel Tyler
mentors: Herbert Breunung and Jos Boumans
Blog | Code | CPAN distribution
Native Call Interface Signatures and Stubs Generation for Parrot
student: Kevin Tew
mentor: Jerry Gay
Mail | Code | (older branch)
Incremental Tricolor Garbage Collector
student: Andrew Whitworth
mentor: chromatic
Blog | Code
Math::GSL
student: Thierry Moisan
mentor: Jonathan Leto
Blog | Code | CPAN distribution
