Improving Decoding Modularity

Description

This idea involves file encodings. File encodings on Perl 6 are decoded in MoarVM. At the moment we have separate sections of code for handling decoding of static data and a separate path for decoding a stream of data. This project involves unifying the two sets of code to make it easier to add further encodings and reduce tha chance of differences between the two code paths. If attempting this project it is highly recommended to first have implemented a new encoding themself to familiarize themself with the codebase.

Expected outcomes

Expected that the student creates a common code path that stream and non stream decoding can use, with the only difference being the outside loop calling the processing function.

Nice to have: the student identifies common data that must be stored between iterations of the file decoding process, allowing different file encodings to reuse the outer loops.

Required skills

Most of the work will be in C, whoever takes on the project should know C. Knowing Perl or Perl 6 is not needed.

Rating

Medium Hard

Possible mentors

Samantha McVey (samcv) is able to be a mentor for this project. Can be reached at samantham@posteo.net or on Freenode as samcv.