PLSE at UW is the Programming Languages and Software Engineering Lab at the University of Washington. We are a group of researchers who are software developers at heart, and our aim is to make programming better. We are interested in anything that will help programmers to be more effective. We design, build, implement, and evaluate: new programming languages; new type systems; tools for controlling concurrency; automated testing environments; IDEs; program analysis tools; security mechanisms; and much more.
We release as much code as possible under a permissive open-source license. This gives our work greater practical impact. It also supports the scientific method, which requires reproducibility and independent verification of results, and in which building on others' work should be easy to do.
We have had significant impact on both industry and academia. Here are two recent examples that are related to our proposed projects. (We have a lot of other projects going on, so there are other possibilities, but we think these are particularly good matches for GSoC.)
If you have any questions, please direct them to the appropriate developer mailing list, or send general questions to mernst@cs.washington.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!
A tip for applicants: Please don't spam us with text that is pasted directly from our suggestions into your application form. We will reject such applicants. Instead, show us how you are different from the masses of other students. Show that you have thought about the problem, have tried the tools, and/or have special skills or perspective. And tell us why this particular project is especially exciting to you. Thanks!
During 2010, Google Summer of Code sponsored three successful projects that were mentored by PLSE at UW. For details about these projects, including documentation and source code, see the PLSE at UW GSoC 2010 project at Google Code.