GSoD 2021 Project Ideas
HPX's existing documentation can be found here. While it's already quite extensive, it has grown organically and needs restructuring and heavy editing. We recently moved our documentation to Sphinx for better navigation, but the content remained mostly unchanged. One problem is that the documentation contains a lot of information, which means that beginners can often struggle to find what they're looking for. At the same time, we don't want more advanced users to feel like they can't find what they're looking for.
The HPX documentation is written using reStructuredText and rendered using Sphinx. Familiarity with these is helpful but not required as reStructuredText is easy to pick up. In addition, since HPX is mostly implemented in C++, at least a basic level of familiarity with C++ will be helpful in understanding code examples and concepts explained in the documentation.
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Abstract: HPX is largely modeled on existing or proposed C++ standard library functionality. While it's often enough to point users to standard library documentation (e.g., cppreference) as the HPX implementations usually follow the standard, it makes for a less than ideal experience for users as they have to jump between two different sites to learn about the HPX APIs. In some cases, the HPX APIs extend the standard facilities, and the standard documentation is not sufficient for users. This project aims to document such functionality within HPX for easier access for users. Examples of such un- or underdocumented features are
future,async,tuple,optional,any. Presenting our API documentation in a better way can be combined with this project. - Deliverable: New and/or corrected documentation for facilities corresponding to standard facilities.
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Mentors: Parsa Amini (
), Mikael Simberg (
)
- Abstract: As part of the move to Sphinx as a documentation system, the quality of presentation of our API documentation was reduced. As we're also planning a new major release of HPX and intend to specify the public API, a more curated presentation of the API may be a better experience for users. This project aims to take our current API documentation and present it in a more user-friendly way, either through the existing tools (Doxygen and Sphinx), through Sphinx extensions (Breathe), or tools completely outside of Sphinx (standalone Doxygen). The current API documentation is presented here in a largely unstructured way.
- Deliverable: Restructured API documentation.
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Mentors: Parsa Amini (), Mikael Simberg ()
- Abstract: There are several HPX tutorials (e.g., HPX Workshop at HLRS - 2019) that implement example applications that are useful beginners. Some of these examples (e.g., Fibonacci, 1D Stencil) are included in the HPX documentation, and some are not. The objective of this project is to add these tutorials to the HPX documentation.
- Deliverable: New tutorials in HPX documentation based on existing code and other presentation material
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Mentors: Parsa Amini (), Mikael Simberg ()
- Abstract: We always appreciate volunteer contributions to HPX but think that the process could be made easier to encourage new contributors. Our contributor's guide should be as straightforward as possible and contain the necessary steps for a new contributor to go from building to testing and submitting a pull request. Currently, there is only a minimal amount of information in the "Developer documentation" section of our documentation. In addition, there is scattered information for contributors in this wiki.
- Deliverable: A new contributor's guide in our documentation to consolidates the existing information in the documentation and this wiki and expands it if needed with missing information.
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Mentors: Parsa Amini (), Mikael Simberg ()
- Abstract: The HPX documentation currently contains headers that can be re-organized to enable quicker lookup and generate more intuitive documentation. Consider, for instance, comprehensive build instructions for HPX are found hidden under the manual header. While basic build instructions exist under quick start, a better alternative would be to have a "build instructions" header that takes you through the quick install and a step-by-step guide for cases when the former method throws CMake or compiler errors. The project aims at improving the visibility of certain headers through re-organizations.
- Deliverable: Restructured documentation layout with more intuitive headers and general sentence improvements.
- Mentors: Nikunj Gupta ([email protected]), Giannis Gonidelis ([email protected])