The OCaml Summer Project

If you look at the previous post, you should now have links to the proposals for the projects in question.  Enjoy…

The OSP decisions are finally in. We got an impressive collection of proposals, and from that collection we’ve selected six that we think can make a real contribution to the OCaml ecosystem. Here is a quick description of the proposals we’ve selected:

• ocamlwizard: A set of batch-oriented tools to support IDE-like features in various different platforms, such as Eclipse or Emacs. Features to be supported include contextual help, path completion, and refactoring.
• multicore: An effort to create a new multicore-capable GC and runtime for the OCaml system.
• menhir enhancements: A set of improvements to the menhir parser-generator, including a new table-based back-end that will prevent menhir from creating oversized parsers.
• qtcaml: Steps towards creating a Qt binding for OCaml. The work this summer will focus on tools to support the semi-automatic generation of interfaces between OCaml and C++.
• delimited overloading: A syntax extension to ease the writing of efficient arithmetic expressions in OCaml.
• easy ocaml: A pedagogically-aimed front-end for the OCaml runtime that supports limited versions of the language with fewer features and better error messages, in the style of HtDP and PLT-Scheme.

In the next few days, we intend to post the full text of the selected proposals. We’d like to thank all of the people who contributed proposals this year. As always, there were a lot of good proposals that we couldn’t fund.

It’s now April 1st, so we are no longer accepting more OSP proposals. It looks like a strong collection of proposals (many of them coming in the last couple of days; don’t underestimate the power of a deadline.) Happily, I think we’ll have some hard decisions to make.

Our original announcement was somewhat vague on deadlines, so I wanted to be more explicit. We will accept applications until the end of March, and we will respond finally to all applications by the second week of April.

We already have a number of very interesting applications, and we hope to see more as the month progresses.

I am pleased to announce the second OCaml Summer Project! The OSP is again aimed at encouraging growth in the OCaml community by funding students over the summer to work on open-source projects in OCaml.

While our goals are the same, the project this year is going to be run differently. The biggest change is that we’re aiming at getting more faculty involvement. We are requiring joint applications from the student or students who will be working on the project, and from a faculty member who both recommends the students and will mentor them throughout the project. Each student will receive a grant of $5k/month, and each faculty member will receive $2k/month. We expect students to treat this as a full-time commitment, and for professors to spend the equivalent of one day a week on the project.

We will also award a prize for what we deem to be the most successful project. Special consideration will be given to projects that display real polish in the form of good documentation, robust build systems, and effective test suites. We’ll announce more details about the prize farther down the line.

Take a look at the FAQ if you want to learn more. We’re looking forward to another exciting summer!

From August 15th-17th we had our OSP end-of-summer meeting. Twelve participants from nine of the projects attended. We also had invited talks from Olin Shivers and Phil Wadler. Several people from local universities (NYU, Long Island University) and companies also
attended.

Each of the projects gave a talk and demo. Here are the projects that were presented:

• Caml-Shcaml: Objective Caml in the small. Alec Heller and Jesse Tov.
• OCaml Reins: A Persistent Data Structure Library for OCaml. Mike Furr.
• Parser Combinator Library. Chris Casinghino.
• Dromedary: An Enhanced OCaml Editor. Therapon Skotiniotis and Christos Dimoulas
• Erlang Style concurrent and Distributed Programming in OCaml. Benedikt Grundmann.
• Cross-platform Functional-reactive GUI Library. Chris King.
• OCaml Mathematical Framework. Olivier Bouissou and Alexandre Chapoutot.
• OCaml Visualization Toolkit. Cap Petschulat.
• Laying the Foundations for an Advanced Visualization System in OCaml. Kree Cole-McLaughlin.

The code for the projects is available in our SVN repository: svn://osprepo.janestcapital.com/osp/2007

Olin Shivers gave a talk on Little Languages, and Phil Wadler gave two talks, Comprehensive Comprehensions and Well-typed Programs Can’t be Blamed.

Here are some pictures from the meeting.

Ron Minksy introducing Phil Wadler.

Phil Wadler speaking on Comprehensive Comprehensions.

Olivier Bouissou’s talk.

Kree Cole-McLaughlin’s talk.

A demo session.

Phil Wadler and Olin Shivers.

Group Photo.

We look forward to next year’s OSP. Watch this space for an announcement.

Of the more than 50 proposals we received, we have decided to fund the following 12 projects for the 2007 OSP:

• Caml-Shcaml: Objective Caml in the small; by Alec Heller and Jesse Tov
• OCaml Visualization Toolkit; by Cap Petschulat
• Parser combinator library; by Chris Casinghino
• Cross-platform functional-reactive GUI library; by Chris King
• System F-based Genetic Programming library; by Franck Binard
• NorthPole: A concurrency framework for Objective Caml; by Jonathan Bryant
• Laying the Foundations for an Advanced Visualization System in O’Caml; by Kree Cole-McLaughlin
• OCaml Reins: A persistent Data Structure Library for OCaml; by Mike Furr
• OCaml Mathematical Framework; by Olivier Bouissou and Alexandre Chapoutot
• Dromedary: An Enhanced OCaml Editor; by Therapon Skotiniotis and Christos Dimoulas
• MLML: Machine Learning in ocaML; by Stefan Ciobaca
• Erlang style concurrent and distributed programming in OCaml; by Benedikt Grundmann

There were a lot of good proposals that didn’t make the cut, not because they weren’t worth doing, but because we have limited resources for mentoring projects. We hope many of these projects are still pursued.

We’re happy about about the number and quality of the proposals we received, and we’re looking forward to a great summer and a lot of great new software!

We’d like to give a friendly reminder that the deadline for project proposals is this Thursday, March 15th. Proposals will not be accepted after the 15th. Hurry and get your proposals in!

We now have a poster! Better late than never. Please post on a university bulletin board near you.

We’re starting to receive proposals, and they look good so far. It’s worth noting that it’s good to submit early, since if your proposal is promising but needs work, we will give you some suggestions to improve it and make it more likely to be accepted.

If you’d like to get some physical posters, please email us at osp@janestcapital.com with your snail-mail address.

We are now accepting proposals for the 2007 OCaml Summer Project. As a reminder, proposals should be emailed to osp@janestcapital.com. Please see the faq for more details about the format your project proposal should take.

We will begin considering proposals as they arrive. All submissions will receive a response no later than March 30th.