[GSoC '20 Project Interest] - Improve MergeFunctions to incorporate MergeSimilarFunction patches and ThinLTO Support

Hello,

I'm Ruijie Fang, currently a 1st-year undergraduate at Princeton
University, majoring in Computer Science.

I am writing to to express my interest in the Google Summer of Code
project: Improve MergeFunctions to incorporate MergeSimilarFunction
patches and ThinLTO Support.

I've read the LCTES'14 paper and found it quite interesting and
comprehensible. I've also went as far as starting to read the source
code for the stack of patches listed on the LLVM GSoC website. I'm
wondering if anyone could provide some advice/tips on getting started
on this project, or writing my project proposal. I'm also in contact
with the project mentor, Aditya Kumar --- I'm also posting here per
his request and for additional input.

( A bit about myself: I am taking an LLVM-based compilers course
(COS320 [1]) this semester; I'm doing well in the course and enjoyed
writing compiler-related projects. A few years back, I was a research
assistant at Temple University's CS department working on
fault-tolerant parallel programming on distributed shared memory using
tuple spaces. So I have a bit of prior experience programming large,
production-quality, systems code in C/C++. Besides that, I'm also
fluent in OCaml (which our compilers course uses), and a few other
languages, including familiarity with LLVM IR and x86/ARM assembly.
My GitHub account is at thefangbear (weekend bear) ยท GitHub and
https://github.com/ruijiefang.)

Thank you, and looking forward to replies!

[1]: COS 320: Compiling Techniques

Kind regards,
Ruijie Fang
ruijief@princeton.edu

CC'ed Aditya

Thanks Johannes,
Just sent an email to llvm-dev with a starter assignment.