On Thu, 2026-01-22 at 15:31 -0600, Noah Johannessen via Gcc wrote: > Howdy! > > I hope you don’t mind the cold outreach. I’m a CS student at Texas > A&M > who’s been following some of the work coming out of the GSoC > ecosystem, and > your involvement caught my eye. > > I’m exploring a small, student-led project this spring. As part of > that, > I’ve been reaching out to a few folks whose judgment I respect to get > a > sense for what kinds of problems are actually useful to work on. > > In particular, I was curious whether you’d ever be open to students > taking > on a well scoped project aligned with your work. Even a quick gut > check on > whether that’s something you ever consider would be super helpful.
Hi Noah, thanks for reaching out, and welcome to the GCC development community. There's no shortage of things to work on in GCC (and the other parts of the GNU toolchain), but a few questions for you: * You say a "small" project - do you have a sense of how many hours you're looking to put into this, and over what kind of time period? That should give us a sense of what's feasible in terms of scope. * When would this project happen? Right now the GCC dev community is focusing on stabilizing/bugfixing trunk for the upcoming GCC 16 release (hopefully in April). So "this spring" is probably a good time for us to be looking at new work; hopefully we'll have branched for the release by then. * How familiar are you with compiler internals, and GCC's internals in particular? You might want to take a look at https://gcc-newbies-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and to try building GCC from source and hacking about with it, if you haven't already. Maybe try the "hello world" challenge described here: https://gcc-newbies-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started.html#hello-world-from-the-compiler > I appreciate the work you’ve done in the space! Thanks! Hope this is helpful Dave
