There Are Many Interesting Google Summer of Code 2020 Open-Source Projects

Google this week announced accepted projects for Summer of Code 2020 as their virtual engagement for getting students involved in open-source development. As usual, there are a lot of interesting GSoC projects.

Google Summer of Code is the annual project funded by Google where they pay student developers to get involved in open-source development by working on different defined tasks. Among the hundreds of accepted projects this year for GSoC 2020 include:

- Blender is to see work for improving I/O performance on large files, volumetric soft body simulations, and other features.

- Coreboot is to see full support for building with the LLVM Clang compiler.

- Debian is to see packaging and QA testing of COVID-19 related applications. Debian is also seeing work done on a systemd unit translator, Android SDK Tools packaging, and other work.

- Gentoo is seeing a project to make a "full-featured Gentoo-like ChromiumOS" that offers the Chromebook experience with the flexibility of Portage and other Gentoo packages. Gentoo is also seeing Portage-powered Android and porting Relibc to this distribution.

- GNOME is to see more testing and work to improve the Linux battery life. GNOME is also seeing various UI work.

- The GCC compiler is exploring work for the automatic detection of parallel compilation viability.

- Haiku OS is working on XFS file-system support as well as UFS2.

- Inkscape has a project to work on GPU rendering using Pathfinder.

- KDE is to see better MMS support within KDE Connect's SMS client. Another KDE project is working on subtitling support in Kdenlive.

- Libvirt support for the Jailhouse Hypervisor.

- Mozilla is to see help on their Servo WebGPU support. Another Mozilla project is looking at Sandboxing libraries in Firefox with WASM.

- Pitivi will be working on render improvements as well as face detection and tracking.

- Link-Time Optimization (LTO) support for the Swift stack.

- Porting of VLC to WebAssembly. VideoLAN is also seeing projects to provide user-interface improvements for VLC on the desktop, implementing CPU filters on the GPU, Qt GUI work, and dav1d improvements.

- Machine learning and compiler optimizations for LLVM. LLVM is also to see improvements around parallelism-aware analyses and optimizations.

- The sole accepted project for the X.Org Foundation is for improving the Virtual KMS (VKMS) support using the IGT GPU Tools.

- The NetBSD project is seeing Phoronix Test Suite integration for benchmarking their kernel and libraries for regression testing / performance monitoring.

The complete list of accepted GSoC 2020 projects can be found at summerofcode.withgoogle.com. It will certainly be interesting to see how these various efforts pan out and ideally work their way upstream.