Fall of Code?

Actually, Fall, Winter and Spring of code. Sun just announced the Solaris 10 Univesity Challenge Content. That’s right, it’s a challenge and a contest and with three times the staying power of single season of code. Apparently in a modern day treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Google ceded the rest of the year to Sun. Perhaps this was the real beef of the recent Sun/Google agreement.

This is actually pretty cool: be a college student, do something cool on OpenSolaris, take a shot at winning the grand prize of $5k and a sweet box (I imagine there might be prizes for other interesting entries). There are some ideas projects on the contest/challenge/seasonal coding page ranging from good (MythTV), to mundane (support for inkjet printers from Epson), to confusing (internet gaming — I thought online gamling was its own reward), to inane (“A joystick driver – for gaming”, oh for gaming? I’ve been using it for system administration). Here’s my list off the top of my head — if you want more ideas, feel free to drop me a line.

Work on an existing open source project

• pearpc runs ppc applications on x86. I started working on porting it over and was able to boot Darwin.
• valgrind is very cool (I’ve only just seen it). It would be great to port it or to use pieces like KCacheGrind and plug in DTrace as a backend.
• Port over your favorite application, or get it running in some emulation environment of your own devising.
• Make something go faster. MySQL, Gnome, mozilla, some random system call, whatever; there’s a lot of inefficiency out there.

Write something new (using cools stuff in Solaris)

• I’d love to see more dynamic languages with native DTrace support. We’ve already got support for Java, php, Ruby, and Perl in some form; make it better or add support for some other language you know and love (TCL, python, scheme, LISP, ML, etc.).
• Build another kind of analysis tool on top of DTrace. We’re working on a Java binding which is going to make this easier.
• Write a device driver for your favorite crazy device (which I assume is your new iPod nano or something; you’re such a hipster Apple fanboy).
• Build a tool to simulate a distributed environment on Zones and use DTrace to monitor the communication. WARNING: your distributed systems professor will be your new best friend.

That’s what I’d do, but if you have a better idea, go do that instead.

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