As a beginner with no connection to the LLVM community, getting into contributing to LLVM is hard. To keep the LLVM developer community healthy with a steady stream of new developers coming in, we need tutorials that explain how to accomplish basic tasks in the real LLVM code base. Examples include writing/improving a Clang warning, and adding/improving an optimization pass. Those tutorials are not only helpful for unaffiliated beginners, but can also help onboard new employees as well as provide insights for experienced LLVM developers into parts of the project we are not familiar with. To start this effort, we wrote three new tutorials with supporting documentation: “My First Typo Fix” (explaining the end-to-end development workflow), “My First Clang Warning”, and “My First Clang/LLVM Tutorial” (showcasing the contents of this talk), with more tutorials to come. To scale this effort of creating new tutorials and cover most parts of the LLVM project, we need to engage more members of the LLVM community to join us. We will share our experience of writing and testing the tutorials we created and give recommendations on how to write beginner-friendly, inclusive tutorials for the LLVM project.
