Hello everyone,
I'm really excited to share that, once again, Swift is going to participate in Google Summer of Code! By now, maybe you've already seen potential participants start some threads 
Last year we managed to run 5 awesome and successful projects. If you're curious about what they were, you can read about it right from their participants and mentors on the Swift blog.
For this year, we already collected some potential project ideas along with their mentors who volunteered to participate on the Swift website: Swift.org - Project Ideas for GSoC 2023.
This year we have prepared a new forums category dedicated to GSoC, because we found that while some projects have a good space to talk about it (like the server category), some projects didn’t really have a good home to discuss before (and after) they kicked off. We do still encourage using the gsoc-2023 tag to mark all gsoc related threads, and not all of them need to be in this new category. However this category should help lead dicussions which otherwise didn't have a great home.
As usual, we are looking forward to hearing about your project ideas, and suggest opening a thread in the new forums category describing your project idea and areas where you’d need help to make it a reality. If a project seems compelling and possible to achieve within the GSoC timeframe, we will do our best to find mentors for it.
We are interested in projects that contribute to the “Swift project”, which includes all kinds of projects in various focus areas. Here are a few examples of projects which could be candidates for GSoC project ideas:
- The Swift compiler itself (typechecker, frontend, backend, standard library), projects can include improving debugging, performance, adding a small feature,
- Related packages, like Collections, Async Algorithms, SwiftSyntax, SourceKit-LSP, DocC, Distributed Actor Cluster, and more,
- Packages primarily used by the server ecosystem, including proposing new libraries for not yet supported databases, queues or other APIs,
- The Swift Package Manager, Swift website, documentation or other parts of Swift.
You can review last year’s successful projects on our Swift blog to get a feel for what kinds of projects are accepted.
This year we are also opening up mentor roles for non-Apple employees. If you are an experienced Swift contributor and are interested in providing mentoring to our participants as a GSoC mentor, please keep an eye out for further announcements, or contact me using the contact details below. This is a new process to us, so we'll see how it works out, but we are interested in opening up mentoring to the wider Swift project contributors.
We are also looking into providing more opportunities to meet other Swift contributors as part of the GSoC experience.
The Summer of Code process
Summer of Code accepts not only students, but also newcomers to open source. It is intended as a great first step to learn how open source, and the Swift project, operate and hopefully build a stronger community through forging lasting relationships built over those projects.
You can refer to this small intro video that explains the concept and goals of the program, and make sure to read these two crucial guides available on the GSoC website: Contributor Guide and Advice for Applying to GSoC.
Timeline
You can view Full GSoC timeline, including all deadlines and milestones, on the summer of code page.
The most important deadline at this point in time is the one for submitting proposals.
The GSoC website will:
- open for applications Monday, March 20, 2023 at 18:00 UTC
- and close on Tuesday, April 4, 2023 18:00 UTC.
At that time you’ll have to have a complete project proposal, which includes a detailed plan on how you’ll tackle the project and submit it using the tool on the Summer of Code website.
We recommend starting threads on the forums in the dedicated category or in a category specific to the project you are interested in and use the gsoc-2023 tag when creating the post — this way it will be easier for mentors to locate threads about projects.
Feel free to ask any questions and reach out to project mentors via these threads, all with the goal to figure out the details of the projects. You should eventually collaborate with the mentors and write your project proposal, which will then be posted to the summer of code site.
If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to reach out to me directly using forums direct messaging, or email at ktoso apple.com.