[GSoC] Designing a faster index format

Hello,

I'm Thomas Gummerer (@tgummerer on Twitter, tgummerer on IRC), 21 years old from Italy. I'm currently a 3rd year Bachelor student in Applied Computer Science at the Free University of Bolzano. I started programming in High School about 8 years ago with Pascal and then learned C and Java. For some of my projects you can visit my homepage (http://tgummerer.com/projects), most of them are from university and some personal projects I did in my free time. My blog is also on the same homepage, but not really active. Unfortunately I couldn't yet participate in any bigger open source project, although I'm interested in it basically since I started programming. 

I would be interested in the Designing a faster index format project for Google Summer of Code. I'm using git for every project where it is possible after switching to it 2-3 years ago from svn. It would be awesome to be able to contribute to it and make it faster. I think this project could be a good fit for me, because I like trying to optimize data structures and algorithms for the best performance possible.

There are some questions I would have about the project. Has there already been any development or thoughts in that direction? In the description databases are mentioned, but that would probably make it harder to read for other .git-reading programs?

Thanks, Thomas Gummerer