April 2009 Help Wanted

[Charles]

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, which I'm always busy on.

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. See the CobraDevelop forum.

-- Create a Visual Studio plugin. See VSX Dev Center.

-- 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
Cobra XNA mini example
Regex How To (we now have a Sample posted in the forums)

"Samples" do something useful or instructive, using whatever features and libraries they need. "How To"s focus on a particular feature or aspect of Cobra, contain instructional comments and don't generally do any useful work. 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.

-- Note the currently our Trac install is often unresponsive, but we have an expert that will be looking into that shortly.

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