[tug-summer-of-code] Project idea: LaTeX3 "microkernel"

[Joseph Wright]

Hello all,

I've proposed in various places a LaTeX3 "microkernel", and I wonder if
this might be an interesting project for the Summer of Code.  The plan
would be to write something based on the existing expl3 code which could
typeset a minimal document:

\documentclass{minimal} % Or something similar
\begin{document}
\emph{Hello World!}
\end{document}

without using LaTeX2e at all. A lot of the work would involve finding
how to re-implement the LaTeX kernel in the expl3 syntax.

At the initial stage, the plan would not be to make major alterations to
the way LaTeX works (a lot of work needs to be done by the team on this
yet). Of course, there are lots of ideas that could be brought to the
project if initial progress was fast (for example, Will Robertson's
suggests about the catcodes of special characters in the document body).

While this would be somewhat separate to the official LaTeX3 work, I'd
hope that the team would be supportive of the idea. It would show up
problems with the current expl3 code, and would hopefully provide some
useful code for the team to eventually use.

Thoughts?
-- 
Joseph Wright