GSoC 2024 ‐ Snehil Shah
Hey there! I am Snehil Shah, a computer science undergraduate (as of writing this) at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Nagpur, India. Apart from my interest in computers and software, I have a dormant passion for audio DSP and synthesis.
The read-eval-print loop (REPL) is a fixture of data analysis and numerical computing and provides a critical entry-point for individuals seeking to learn and better understand APIs and their associated behavior. For a library emphasizing numerical and scientific computing, a well-featured REPL becomes an essential tool allowing users to easily visualize and work with data in an interactive environment. The stdlib REPL is a command-line based interactive interpreter environment for Node.js equipped with namespaces and tools for statistical computing and data exploration enabling easy prototyping, testing, debugging, and programming.
This project aimed to implement a suite of enhancements to the stdlib REPL to achieve feature parity with similar environments for scientific computing such as IPython and Julia. These enhancements include:
- Fuzzy auto-completion
- Syntax highlighting
- Visualization tools for tabular data
- Multi-line editing
- Paged outputs
- Bracketed-paste
My work on the REPL started before the official coding period began. Before that, I had contributed to some good first issues to get a gist of project conventions and contribution flow. Let's go over each of the features I worked on:
My first work on the REPL was implementing auto-closing brackets/quotations, a common feature in IDEs and code editors.
As my first PR on the REPL, it wasn't the safest landing, with @kgryte doing most of the heavy lifting. We did get it through the finish line after a month of coding and review cycles, and by this time I had a good grasp of the REPL codebase.
Earlier, when an output was longer than the terminal height, it would scroll all the way to the end of the output. This meant the user had to scroll all the way back up to start reading the output. The pager aims to capture long outputs and display them in a scrollable way.
TODO: include a list of links to all relevant PRs along with a short description for each. For small bug fix PRs, you can group them together and describe them as, e.g., "various maintenance work".
TODO: add a summary of the current state of the project.
TODO: add a summary of what remains left to do. If there is a tracking issue, include a link to that issue.
TODO: add a summary of any unexpected challenges that you faced, along with any lessons learned during the course of your project.
TODO: add a report summary and include any acknowledgments (e.g., shout outs to contributors/maintainers who helped out along the way, etc).