9.2  Apps

Software teams scale poorly in general, and open source teams scale especially badly, so the most efficient way to contribute code to Mythryl development is to expand the software ecology by writing or porting to Mythryl whatever application lies closest to your heart. (Motivation is everything!)

Mythryl apps I would personally particularly welcome include (in roughly increasing order of difficulty):

• A graphic biff. (I’m a fan of XBuffy, so I’d probably start by porting it.)
• A classic mud. Or a port of Moonflare’s MLud.
• A TMDA-style challenge-response spam filter.
• An HTTP daemon. (Apache is far too big to port, so I would look for some small security-oriented daemon as a starting point.)
• A decent email client. (I would start by porting the Pronto Perl/Gtk client.)
• A mailing list manager. (I might start by porting MailMan.)
• A web browser. I’m sick of flaky, leaky, unscriptable browsers. Start by doing a simple Gtk wrapper of the Gecko engine, then start porting parts from C to Mythryl.
• A raytracer. Everyone loves doing simple raytracers in functional languages. For (much!) extra credit: Implement the RenderMan spec.
• An Arduino compiler, development environment and interface library. Too much fun!
• An CNC compiler, development platform, interface and driver. The current open source offerings are pathetic, so my CNC mill is gathering dust.
• An SMTP daemon. (I would start implementing the Exim. spec, which may well be the best-written spec in the open-source world.)
• A TeXmacs-style programming editor. (For extra credit, make it groupware!)
• A nice integrated app/framework for monitoring and managing a lanful of Linux boxes, including firewall configuration, drive health monitoring and programmable intrusion detection. Call it Argus. :)
• A port of CMU’s Nyquist sound-synthesis language.
• A programmable 3D graphics environment. (I’m a fan of AVS 4 and GeomView, so I’d probably produce a mix of the two with some Blender thrown in.)
• A port of the Ardour sound editor. A Mythryl version should be solid enough to use; the C version may never be.
• A port of the Cinelerra video editor. A Mythryl version should be solid enough to use; the C version may never be.
• A peer-to-peer virtual world, sort of a sane acephalous Second Life.

If you do this, please make an effort to use existing Mythryl libraries wherever appropriate, and failing that to structure as much as practical of your application as libraries and generics re-usable by others.