Google Summer of Code 2026, Ada's participation?

[Irvise]

Dear community,

the application for organisations which want to partake in GSoC 2026 is opening next week, and will end two weeks later. Are we going to participate this year/time? A decision must be taken, and fairly quick.

In 2025 we did not participate directly, but we did get some work done as part of GCC’s participation, you can read more about it in this forum post:

Ada 2022 'parallel' implementation beta for FSF GCC/GNAT

I am very pleased to announce that the core Ada 2022 “parallel” features have been implemented for mainline FSF GNAT as part of a successful Google Summer of Code project. The patch is now ready for beta testing. We are preparing to formally submit this patch to the FSF GCC project, to have it incorporated into GCC trunk, and therefore all future FSF GCC releases. Before we make that submission, we hope to seek additional feedback from the Ada community. This patch introduces most core capabil…

There are three ways in which we could participate:

1. Just like last year, we do not participate directly and if there are projects that could benefit from Ada contributions, we apply to those. See the example above. Some ideas for this could be further Ada improvements in GCC, or adding support for other systems (such as BSDs) as part of their applications.
2. A major Ada project could apply, such as Alire. This could greatly benefit the entire community.
3. Directly as a community, such as Fortran’s or Rust’s applications.

The best thing would be option 3 or at least 2. However, someone has to step up and take over the effort of applying to GSoC. I personally will not be able to carry out this task, but I could help review or server as a backup contact person if the time arrives. I am pinging some relevant people just in case: @mosteo, @sttaft, @Richard-Wai @DirkCraeynest @Fabien.C

Remember, anybody can participate as a “student” (that is no longer a requirement, but the goal is that applicants to tasks must learn from it).

Best regards,
Fer

[sttaft]

We will almost certainly apply to do another enhancement to the GNAT FE through GCC. Establishing a separate Ada-specific GSoC “organization” does sound like a good idea, but it is also a lot of work. Apparently there is a bit of an epidemic of GSoC applications that are largely AI “slop”, according to the GSoC mentor email list. I encourage someone to create an Ada-specific GSoC organization, but don’t underestimate the amount of work!