CLISP Help Wanted

CLISP project founder Bruno Haible was one of the finalists for the 2002 Free Software Award! Note that it said:

"Bruno Haible (known for his work on GNU CLISP)"!

Now it is your chance to win the next Free Software Award!

The CLISP project is looking for excellent C hackers who can handle some problems in the current development sources.

The prizes for handling these issues:

handle one issue and you get CVS write access;
handle two issues and you become an admin of the CLISP project;
handle three or more issues and you become the principal maintainer.

This reminds me of a joke: after the 1991 Russian coup attempt (whose failure lead to the final downfall of communism), the Communist Party was very unpopular and tried to increase the membership by asking its members to recruit new members, with the following incentives:

if you bring one new member, you don't have to pay membership dues
if you bring two new members, you may resign from the Party
if you bring three new members, you may resign and you will also receive a certificate that you have never been a member of the Party!

The CLISP tasks

Entry-level tasks

Add a module interfacing to libmagic.
Add a serial module to control serial devices using <termios.h> on unix and SetCommState on windows.

Segmentation faults

Any hard crash (segmentation fault, bus error etc) is a bug in CLISP. See CLISP bug tracker.

New features

CLISP offers a module that interfaces to Matlab but no module that interfaces to Octave - the free replacement to Matlab. This is ideologically intolerable to the GNU party committee (despite the fact that Octave does not offer a C API yet), so you are hereby invited to volunteer to implement the Matlab C API for Octave and then make sure that the CLISP Matlab module works with that new Octave C API.
multi-threading (see src/xthread.d, src/zthread.d, src/threads.lisp, doc/multithread.txt) (Vladimir Tzankov is working on this)
Embed CLISP into your favorite application, e.g., VIM, Gnumeric, or OpenOffice. This might require some additional API in CLISP, which we will be happy to add.
native file compilation (e.g., bytecodes→C)
native just-in-time compilation (Yann Dauphin is working on JITC via lightning)
compilation to JVM (this was thought to be important 10 years ago when the main task of the computer industry was perceived to be speeding up JVM, so we wanted to ride the wave, this might still be useful, but has a rather low priority)
GUI (e.g., wxCL)
SSL bindings (note cl-ssl)
LDAP and gnome-config support in modules/dirkey

Infrastructure

Use libtool to produce lisp.so (lisp.dll on woe32) instead of lisp.run (lisp.exe on woe32).
Use dlopen (LoadLibrary on woe32) instead of exec (CreateProcess on woe32) to start a linking set in clisp (clisp.exe on woe32). This is related to embeddability.