[fpc-devel] Summer of code collaboration

[Vittorio Giovara]

Hi all,
I'm one of the developer of Hedgewars, an open source video game all
written with FreePascal. Please see the full site at
http://www.hedgewars.org/

One of the Hedgewars project is to make a WebGL/Javascript version of the
game so that it can run in a browser. To do that we are using a tool named
'emscripten' which takes LLVM bytecode and generates Javascript, without
affecting performance too much. Yes, we had to write a horribly hacked
converter that took the small subset of Pascal used by Hedgewars and
convert it to C (on a side node, the converter is written in Haskell) and
reimplement the RTL.

So, this got the job done (if you are using an old browser the demo might
still work http://hedgewars.org/hwjs/hwjs.html ) but all this process is
*highly* unmaintainable and very prone to breakage. So the right way (tm)
to achieve this result would be to directly integrate LLVM bytecode
generation inside Freepascal.

I think we could make this work thanks to the Google Summer of Code! This
program (*if* they announce it) basically introduces students to the world
of FOSS development by having them work on projects for an open source
organization during the summer.

I don't know if Freepascal wants to participate on its own, but if not, if
there is one or more developer willing to act as mentor for the students,
Hedgewars (*if* selected) would happily allocate some of its students to
work on this task and act as a "umbrella" for this project targeting
Freepascal sources. Of course the students would still have to write a
sensible project proposal for being accepted.

What do you think of this idea?
Unfortunately I do not know Freepascal sources much and cannot fully
evaluate the load of work, but I still think that we could collaborate on
this level. Also do not underestimate the skills of GSoC students, the demo
I posted above was compiled by one of them.

Cheers,
Vittorio (koda on #hedgewars)
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