Hi,
the CLISP project seems to be "not that active", judging from the mailing list / bug tracker / repository activities. The latest release is 6 years old.
Looking at the code base, I think this low activity stems at least in part from the IMO relatively bad condition it is in. Most of it seems to be quite old, there are (now talking of the C parts) parts that invoke undefined behavior (general pointer comparisons, integer overflows, out of bounds indexing) and some other odd things (the whole additional preprocessing, pre C99 code, indexing from 1 instead of 0, apparently no internal interfaces / abstraction, probably more).
I'd like to change that. In order to do so I'd like to "modernize" the code base, starting with the C code. That means among other things converting to standard compliant code (C99 probably), splitting code into smaller units, establishing internal interfaces.
Before putting (a lot) more work into this I'd like to know whether
a) there's is a general interest to make such - probably huge - changes to the code base, and whether
b) this could be seen as a project (with further details I'd work out then) suitable for GSoC.
I'm asking these - probably too detailed - questions on this list here instead of on one of the CLISP mailing lists because they seem, as already pointed out, to be dead. I was unsure about whether to CC one of the maintainers, because it's discouraged in some communities, and so I didn't. I didn't CC one of the maintainers because such CCing is discouraged in some communities. What's the "correct" way to get in contact here? And: Are there any possible mentors for the CLISP project?
Finally, a very brief info about me: My name is Daniel Jour nee Oertwig, I'm currently pursuing my computer science master's degree at University Wuerzburg, Germany.
I'm a self taught programmer, started learning about 14 years ago and have been doing all kinds of different things, like some hobby OS kernels, programming language ideas, an orbit trajectory calculation tool (I did my bachelor's degree in aerospace computer science :) ), C++ code transformation tools and a lot more. Thus I've been exposed to a lot of technologies, but I'm most proficient with C, C++ and (Common) Lisp and operating system concepts.
I've been working as a teaching assistant for my university's operating systems course, teaching mostly stuff related to multithreading (examples in Java) and GNU/Linux usage. I'm an active user on stackoverflow.
I'm 24 years old, married, two kids (and I should note that my family takes precedence over anything else, thus I'm probably an a bit "riskier" potential GSoC student)
Best regards,
Daniel Jour