Help wanted

[cardillan]

Mindcode has become a relatively large project, and there are a few areas where additional help would be very welcome. First and foremost it is the web application. There's a lot of things to improve there. I managed to add some new features and do some tweaking recently, but as the front-end isn't my area of expertise, more serious changes are beyond my capabilities at the moment. As I see it, what Mindcode needs the most now is:

1. Asynchronous compilation in the web application #162
2. General overhaul of the web interface #163
3. Embedding the documentation within the web application #164
4. Support for syntax highlighting in the web application #165
5. Upgrade Spring to the latest version #166

All these tasks concern pretty much just the web application module, so they don't require much knowledge of Mindcode's internal working. There's a few additional lower priority tasks of similar disposition:

• It would be great to have the graphical output emulated by Mindcode, producing images that could be either displayed in the web application, or saved as a file (or sequence of files) by the command-line tool. The groundwork has been laid down, what remains is just to implement the graphical operations themselves.
• The color directives and icons present in the text buffer could be properly rendered in the web interface.
• Compiled schematics could be rendered and displayed as an image in the web application.
• Creating a Mindcode tutorial (originally there was something resembling a tutorial, but I've rebuilt that into a formal documentation. A proper tutorial would be nice.)
• Expansion of the system library.

If you'd be interested in diving into the Mindcode internals, there's a lot of work to, do but there are a few caveats. The first one is that I plan to completely rewrite the grammar, parser and code generator, so doing anything in these areas is currently not recommended. I hope this work might be finished by the end of this year, and it should be much more accessible for modifications.

Another caveat is that the area offering the most possibilities for improvement are the optimizers, the Data Flow Optimizer in particular. At the same time, these optimizers aren't generally written to the CS compiler's theory standards - they operate directly on the mlog code, and depend heavily on the structure of the code as generated by the code generator. They aren't that well documented either. I hope I'll be able to improve these areas eventually.