Hey Adam,
Thank you so much for your proposal! We have reviewed your submission and so far all the mentors have given it a high rating :)
I took a look at your prototype groovy-manager project, which looks very interesting. You are doing source parsing for groovy, which is pretty challenging.
While writing a parser from scratch can be a thrilling challenge, I have to say that it can be quite a burden! We started writing our own Java-parser for Forge, but quickly came to find that even parsing a type-safe language is incredibly difficult.
We ended up using the Eclipse JDT as a base implementation for our JavaParser.
Have you looked for any Groovy parsers that may already exist today? This would give you a quick boost when working on this project. It may be the case that the parser would require some usability improvements to make integration with Forge simpler, and simpler for plugin devs, but I think it is safe to say that a search for existing parsers is warranted.
If a suitable parser can be found, I would suggest that we revise your proposal to allow for several weeks to become familiar with that parser, and then allocate the rest of the time to actually working with it to implement the gradle support.
The problem with writing your own parser is that you have to maintain it :) Better to delegate.
~Lincoln