Dear GCC representative, My name is Joey and I am a senior Computer Science student at Washington State University. I am interested in contributing to GCC this summer. Last semester, I took a class on compilers and thoroughly enjoyed it. I would be very excited to apply my theoretical knowledge and contribute to a real compiler.
After looking over your project idea list, I became interested in contributing to GCC's Rust Front-End. I have been learning a little bit of Rust over the last couple of months after hearing about its memory safety, high performance, and high-level features. I would love to help integrate this powerful and up-and-coming programming language with the GNU toolchain. The specific project that I was looking into is the *Improving match expressions and pattern matching* project. I have a solid understanding of how compiler front-ends work, and I have experience with creating them using tools like Flex (Fast Lexical Analyzer Generator) and the GNU Bison parser generator. To find regular expressions to match certain patterns, I like to use a tool called RegExr (regexr.com). Something that I will need to further research regarding this project, though, is Rust's syntax. I see that an area of focus here is Rust's struct rebinding pattern -- I will make sure to cover that thoroughly in my research and studying. Another thing that I should mention is that I have experience with C and C++. Most of my programming projects over the last 2 years have been written either in C or C++. Do you have any suggestions for me on whether or not this project is a good fit for me, or still available to work on, before I start writing a proposal? If this project isn't available I would be happy to contribute in other ways. Thank you, Joey
