Sven van Caem (Jun 14 2024 at 13:37): Sven van Caem (Jun 14 2024 at 13:37):Hey! I'm an IT student at a school that requires its students to spend one semester "interning" at a tech company in order to get some hands-on experience. I've been following Roc's development for about a year now and would like to start contributing, and I'm hoping to make arrangements with my school to let me use this semester to do just that! I'm aware of the Project Ideas document; I may be able to pick up one of those as to fill a whole semester, but I would also be happy to start picking up one issue at a time. My school would need a point of contact who is familiar with the project, as they can't meaningfully assess my progress from the outside looking in. Is there anyone I could get in touch with who might be able to fill this role? :)
Anton (Jun 14 2024 at 13:47):Hi @Sven van Caem,
That sounds awesome!
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
What parts of Roc are you interested in working on?
Do you have Rust/Zig or general low level experience?
Is there anyone I could get in touch with who might be able to fill this role? :)
I could do that :) although I already have a lot on my plate so others are welcome to volunteer for this role as well :p
Sven van Caem (Jun 14 2024 at 14:39):Yeah sure! I've been studying embedded systems, so I have enough experience in C and some assembly to feel comfortable. I've been writing hobby projects in Rust in my spare time for a few years now, including currently a toy programming language of my own! I haven't contributed to an open source project before, but there's people at school who can help me get up to speed on that. I'm not yet sure what part of the compiler I'd like to work on! I was planning on picking up some of the "Good first issues" to get a feel for the codebase first. Code generation might be fun, but really I'd just be excited to work on a larger compiler project that's not my own.
Anton (Jun 14 2024 at 14:43):Definitely useful experience!
I was planning on picking up some of the "Good first issues" to get a feel for the codebase first.
Sounds like a great idea :)
Luke Boswell (Jun 14 2024 at 21:53):If you would consider platform development, I would also suggest the "safe scripting platform" idea Richard has been talking about. Basically we can add a feature flag to basic-cli and then it becomes safer to use scripts from anywhere, by adding features like a broswer which promts you if it does something strange.
This would be an interesting rust based project, and would support the roc language by enabling that use case which is pretty unique to roc, and also teach you a lot about the inernals of platforms and apps.
Luke Boswell (Jun 14 2024 at 21:54):Another idea may be to work on glue generation. Lots to do in that space, and this will be very important for people building platforms. It would be good to learn a out the roc types and implementations.
Sven van Caem (Jun 17 2024 at 14:16):Those are great ideas actually, thanks! The safe scripting platform sounds approachable enough, it being in Rust and having existing code to work off of.
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC