Google wasn't interested when they heard my major. Mozilla was more concerned with what I knew and what I was interested in learning. Not to bash Google, I totally understand why they made that decision. But it does outline why I generally should be gearing towards less-than-Google-sized companies!
Even given that I have spoken on numerous occasions with the V8 developers, and had one of my patches to V8's build system accepted, Google didn't even give me a chance. But they are a bigger company, so I can see why Google wouldn't bother with anyone who isn't a CS or BA/BM major, while Mozilla had the time to get to know me and see what I was actually like
It's not that Google doesn't have a good intern program, it's just that their hiring process is not a good fit for someone like me.
Once they actually started talking to me, the people I've talked to at Mozilla were impressed that I understood the underlying concepts of V8 and JS VMs in general (possibly the fact that I had to accurately communicate how V8 worked to someone from Mozilla, who wasn't familiar with V8's code but
did know a thing or two about SM made it more impressive), as well that I had written threaded programs and have a good understanding of thread-safe memory management and concurrent programming in general. And with TurboSphere, I had a solid example to show of my skills.
When I told them about Sphere, they were curious about my impressions of SM versus V8. I had to tell them that I have not had a very...modern experience with SM, unfortunately.
I certainly hope that with what I learn, I will be able to finally make Android a working target for TurboSphere! I've also considered trying to port Sphere 1.6 to it--I've already got FJ-GL working with GL ES 2 from my time with a Raspberry Pi, and it
should be even easier than with TurboSphere, given that it uses a true interpreter.
Also thanks to this internship, I can finally test TurboSphere on OS X, and I could theoretically make an iOS build. But of course, the iOS build
would require a jail-broken phone. Apple is not amused by dynamic JIT compilers.