Getting Involved

LLVM welcomes contributions of all kinds. To get started, please review the following topics:

Development Process

Information about LLVM’s development process.

Forums & Mailing Lists

If you can’t find what you need in these docs, try consulting the Discourse forums. There are also commit mailing lists for all commits to the LLVM Project. The LLVM Community Code of Conduct applies to all these forums and mailing lists.

  • LLVM Discourse

    The forums for all things LLVM and related sub-projects. There are categories and subcategories for a wide variety of areas within LLVM. You can also view tags or search for a specific topic.

  • Commits Archive (llvm-commits)

    This list contains all commit messages that are made when LLVM developers commit code changes to the repository. It also serves as a forum for patch review (i.e., send patches here). It is useful for those who want to stay on the bleeding edge of LLVM development. This list is very high volume.

  • Bugs & Patches Archive (llvm-bugs)

    This list gets emailed every time a bug is opened and closed. It is higher volume than the LLVM-dev list.

  • LLVM Announcements

    If you just want project-wide announcements such as releases, developers meetings, or blog posts, then you should check out the Announcement category on LLVM Discourse.

Online Sync-Ups

A number of regular calls are organized on specific topics. It should be expected that the range of topics will change over time. At the time of writing, the following sync-ups are organized. The LLVM Community Code of Conduct applies to all online sync-ups.

If you’d like to organize a new sync-up, please add the info in the table below. Please also create a calendar event for it and invite calendar@llvm.org to the event, so that it’ll show up on the LLVM community calendar. Please see Guidance on what to put into LLVM community calendar invites for more guidance on what to add to your calendar invite.

For event owners, our Discord bot also supports sending automated announcements of upcoming sync-ups. Please see the Discord bot event pings section for info.

Past online sync-ups

Some online sync-ups are no longer happening. We keep pointing to them here to keep track of the meeting notes and in case anyone would want to revive them in the future.

Table 153 LLVM no-longer-happening sync-up calls

Topic

Frequency

Calendar link

Minutes/docs link

Scalable Vectors and Arm SVE

Monthly, every 3rd Tuesday

ics gcal

Minutes/docs

MemorySSA in LLVM

Every 8 weeks on Mondays

ics gcal

Minutes/docs

Vector Predication

Every 2 weeks on Tuesdays, 3pm UTC

Minutes/docs

MLIR design meetings

Weekly, on Thursdays

Minutes/docs

Office hours

A number of experienced LLVM contributors make themselves available for a chat on a regular schedule, to anyone who is looking for some guidance. Please find the list of who is available when, through which medium, and what their area of expertise is. Don’t be too shy to dial in!

Office hours are also listed on the LLVM community calendar. Of course, people take time off from time to time, so if you dial in and you don’t find anyone present, chances are they happen to be off that day.

The LLVM Community Code of Conduct applies to all office hours.

For event owners, our Discord bot also supports sending automated announcements of upcoming office hours. Please see the Discord bot event pings section for info.

Guidance for office hours hosts

  • If you’re interested in becoming an office hours host, please add your information to the list above. Please create a calendar event for it and invite calendar@llvm.org to the event so that it’ll show up on the LLVM community calendar. Please see Guidance on what to put into LLVM community calendar invites for more guidance on what to add to your calendar invite.

  • When starting an office hours session, if you haven’t set up the Discord bot integration, consider typing something like “Hi, I’m available for chats in the next half hour at video chat URL. I’m looking forward to having conversations on the video chat or here.” on the #office-hours Discord channel.

    Doing this can help:

    • overcome potential anxiety to call in for a first time,

    • people who prefer to first exchange a few messages through text chat before dialing in, and

    • remind the wider community that office hours do exist.

  • If you decide to no longer host office hours, please do remove your entry from the list above.

Discord

Users and developers of the LLVM project (including subprojects such as Clang) can be found on the community’s Discord chat server. The server is actively moderated.

The #buildbot-status channel has a bot for LLVM buildbot status changes. The bot will update the channel with a link to a build bot when a build goes from passing to failing and again when the build goes from failing back to passing. It is a great way to actively monitor the status of the build.

The bot also supports @mention-ing you when your email appears on a blamelist. For more details, DM help to the bot.

Discord bot event pings

Our Discord bot supports automatically sending messages about upcoming events on the LLVM community calendar to Discord. This behavior is controlled on a per-event basis, by metadata in the event’s description. Each piece of metadata should be on its own line in the event description.

The currently supported metadata is:

  • discord-bot-event-type - Required. Specifies the event type. Valid values are office-hours and sync-up.

  • discord-bot-channels-to-mention - Sometimes required. A comma-separated list of Discord channels to post notifications in. If your discord-bot-event-type is office-hours, the #office-hours channel will be implicitly appended to this list (ergo, you don’t need to specify this item). Otherwise, you must specify a value here.

  • discord-bot-mention - Optional. A comma-separated list of people to ping on each event notification. All names mentioned must be Discord usernames, and must have a leading @. e.g., @foo, @bar.

  • discord-bot-reminder-time-before-start - Optional. The number of minutes before the beginning of an event to send a ping. This should be formatted as an integer. Defaults to 30.

  • discord-bot-message - Optional. Text to append to all event pings.

An example of an event description with valid metadata is:

Regular office hours to chat with people about LLVM! We can help with
questions, troubleshooting bugs, etc.

discord-bot-channels-to-mention: #beginners, #foo
discord-bot-event-type: office-hours
discord-bot-mention: @gburgessiv, @bar
discord-bot-message: Come join us for office hours!
discord-bot-reminder-time-before-start: 5

This metadata will prompt the Discord bot to:

  • send pings 5 minutes before the given event starts, mentioning @gburgessiv and @bar in the ping

  • send the pings to the #beginners, #foo, and #office-hours channels

  • include the text “Come join us for office hours!” in the ping

A few minutes before sending a ping, the bot will double-check that the event hasn’t been cancelled.

If you need help troubleshooting, or have feature requests/questions, please feel free to ping @gburgessiv!

Meetups and social events

Besides developer meetings and conferences, there are several user groups called LLVM Socials. We greatly encourage you to join one in your city. Or start a new one if there is none:

How to start LLVM Social in your town

Community wide proposals

Proposals for large-scale changes in how the community behaves and how the work flow can be better.

LLVM community calendar

We aim to maintain a public calendar view of all events happening in the LLVM community such as Online Sync-Ups and Office hours. The calendar can be found at https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=calendar@llvm.org and can also be seen inline below:

Note that the web view of the LLVM community calendar shows events in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). If you use Google Calendar, consider subscribing to it with the + button in the bottom-right corner to view all events in your local time zone alongside your other calendars.

Guidance on what to put into LLVM community calendar invites

To add your event, create a calendar event for it and invite calendar@llvm.org on it. Your event should then show up on the community calendar.

Please put the following pieces of information in your calendar invite:

  • Write a single paragraph describing what the event is about. Include things such as who the event is for and what sort of topics are discussed.

  • State explicitly that the LLVM Community Code of Conduct applies to this event.

  • Make it clear who:

    • the organizer is.

    • the person to contact is in case of any code-of-conduct issues. Typically, this would be the organizer.

  • If you have meeting minutes for your event, add a pointer to where those live. A good place for meeting minutes could be as a post on LLVM Discourse.

  • If you’re hosting a sync-up or office hours event and would like it to be announced by the Discord bot, add the relevant metadata (full descriptions available in the Discord bot event pings section).

An example invite looks as follows

This event is a meetup for all developers of LLDB. Meeting agendas are posted
on Discourse before the event.

Attendees must adhere to the LLVM Code of Conduct
(https://llvm.org/docs/CodeOfConduct.html). For any Code of Conduct reports,
please contact the organizers and also email conduct@llvm.org.

Agenda/Meeting Minutes: Link to minutes

Organizer(s): First Surname (name@email.com)

discord-bot-channels-to-mention: #lldb
discord-bot-event-type: sync-up
discord-bot-mention: @host-username, @another-host
discord-bot-message: Come join us to chat about LLDB!
discord-bot-reminder-time-before-start: 30