December 2008 Help Wanted

[Charles]

I thought I would highlight in what areas Cobra could use help since that may not be obvious to people less familiar with the project. Cobra is an open source project under the MIT license. It runs on a variety of systems including Mac, Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Below I've highlighted some specific things that would help the Cobra project. I've place emphasis on items that can be worked on independently and therefore in parallel to the compiler.

Feel free to discuss these here in the forums, but I recommend starting a fresh topic post to help separate out the conversations. Here we go:

-- Provide editor support for your favorite editor. See EditorSupport in the wiki for the current state of support

-- Integrate Cobra with Microsoft ASP.NET and/or Novell Mono xsp2.

-- Merge in the Mono C# compiler backend to improve Cobra compiler performance. Discussed here.

-- Create a SharpDevelop (aka #develop) plugin. I nudged this forward last week via a discussion and subsequent new forum.

-- Create a Visual Studio plugin. See VSX Dev Center and good luck!

-- Create an .msi installer for Cobra for the next release. ticket:19

-- Benchmarks between IronPython (and also IronRuby) and Cobra would be interesting. How big is the gap? Are there places we could improve upon even further?

-- Some further Samples or How Tos that would be interesting:
Cobra DirectX 3D mini example
Cobra OpenGL mini example
Regex How To
WPF Sample or How To

But if you create a Sample or How To, please try to use a clean, consistent coding style as seen in the existing ones.

-- And of course, hammer on Cobra and report your problems here so they can be fixed and we can get to 1.0.

-- Any Trac ticket not assigned to someone is open to the public for implementation. See also: HowToSubmitAPatch

-- Participate. Join the forums and the discussion. Use your forums handle to login to Trac so you can edit the wiki, work on tickets, etc.

-- If you think of anything else, feel free to discuss here.

[jonathandavid]

Regex How To

I have written two classes for representing Rational numbers and Complex numbers. I intended them as a tool to test operator overloading once it's added to Cobra, but they could also make nice How-To's. In particular, they both contain a "parse" method that takes a string and turns it into a Rational/Complex, using .NET's Regex object.

I will post both them here so that everyone can evaluate them before they're added to the How-To section (in case they are).

Cobra OpenGL mini example

I can work on that if no one also has a working example already.

Regards,
Manuel

[Charles]

Sounds good. Just keep in mind that a "How To" is dedicated to its subject. So a "How To" on regexes would be all about regexes and nothing else. A mini-tutorial if you will.

Certainly you should feel free to post any kind of sample code you want here. I wish people would post more. I suggest starting out with posting in the forums and then post to the wiki later after feedback.