[Rd] Summer of Code, LLVM, parallelization and R

[Florian Gross]

Hi everybody,

I'm currently working towards my Master's degree as a student of  
Computer Science at the University of Saarbrücken and highly  
interested in compiler construction, interpretation techniques,  
optimization, programming languages and more. :)

Two professors of my university approached me about an interesting  
project just a few days ago: Developing a LLVM-based JIT compilation  
back-end for R. The primary goal would be the generation of parallel /  
vectorized code, but other ways of increasing performance might be  
very interesting as well.

I've thought a bit about this and am now wondering if this would make  
sense as a project for Google's Summer of Code program -- I have seen  
that the R foundation was accepted as a mentoring organization in 2008  
and has applied to be one again in this year.

I've already taken part in the SoC program thrice (working on Novell's  
JScript.NET compiler and run-time environment in 2005, writing a  
debugger for the Ruby programming language in 2006 and working on a  
detailed specification for the Ruby programming language in 2007) and  
it has always been a lot of fun and a great experience. One thing that  
was particularly helpful was getting into contact with the development  
communities so easily.

What do you folks think? Would this be of benefit to the R community?  
Would it be a good candidate for this year's SoC installment? :)

Also, if some thinking in this direction has already been done or if  
you have any other pointers, please don't hesitate to reply!

Thanks a lot in advance!

Kind regards,
Florian Gross