This project is very much challenging and fascinating too. And Google Summer of Code is an incredible program for university students to get seriously involved in such projects and open source in general. Last year I worked on porting NetBSD userland to MINIX 3 as part of GSoC and believe me it was an invaluable experience for me which isn't even remotely possible without such program. This year I will work on porting GNU Compiler Collection to HelenOS ( http://blog.vivekp.me/2012/04/25/port-gcc-to-helenos-gsoc-pr... ) as part of GSoC and I am already very excited. I wish this guy good luck and thanks Google for running such amazing program successfully!

HelenOS looks very cool and a port of a compiler to it sounds like a great project!

But why GCC? GCC is the crufty old compiler of yesteryear. It's a solid workhorse but big and inflexible, and in my opinion its importance will be waning as LLVM/Clang matures. Had you considered porting LLVM/Clang instead?

The reason is that Clang does not support all architectures that HelenOS needs support for.

Never heard of HelenOS till now. Reminds me of Minix. Is that about right?

HelenOS (http://www.helenos.org/) and Minix (http://www.minix3.org/) are fundamentally different. While Minix is POSIX compliant, HelenOS has been designed and developed from scratch, improving upon some of the broken legacy conventions in the way. It is not even POSIX compliant, though it has libposix library for now to ease the task of porting foreign sources!

HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among which are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC and SPARC V9.

HelenOS is infact one of the most portable microkernel operating system! Currently it's not as much developed as it's counterparts but it will become a complete and usable modern operating system very soon given the amount of activity going on in there.

I take my hat off to the guy undertaking this. I wish there had been a Google summer of code when I was at Uni. University was some of the best time for programming I ever had. There is so much hunger and energy, and now there are sponsored projects to match. I am very glad that these programs exist.

I really hope a "first year computer science student" can handle this kind of undertaking. Before having taken classes in assembly language programming, operating systems, computer architecture, programming languages, compiler construction and software project management, I could never have been able to make these kinds of commits. If this coder manages to make this port, he will really have earned my respect, before even having completed most of his undergraduate career!

Haiku OS has been in GSoC quite a few years now and tries to to evaluate students skills very carefully before accepting them. Anyone that has been accepted has had to prove their skills and interest. Also there is a pool of core developers ready to answer questions should they arise.

I wouldn't be surprised if he were one of the many kids hacking since his early teens, and has already covered a lot of that before college.

If he have already had patches to the x64 toolchain accepted, he seems at least somewhat competent.

There are people going to uni to learn programming / CS and then there are those who just want the paper...

This guy is undertaking a very complicated task, I wish him good luck!

I hope http://etoileos.com/ gets a SoC too!

So awesome that Haiku is still making progress. Really hope to be able to run it as a full time OS in a few years. Linux has just never lived up to the level of UI polish/consistency I enjoy.