[llvm-dev] Sydney Meetup Update (May 31, 2018)

[Dean Michael Berris via llvm-dev]

Hi llvm-dev,

Just sending a quick note that our most recent Meetup in Sydney went pretty well! We did:

- Pizza and Chicken for dinner!

- “From 0 to LLVM in 30 minutes” live demo of getting a cloud VM instance, setting it up to build the LLVM toolchain from the Monorepo [0]

- Do a cursory overview of the tools in the llvm, clang, and clang-tools-extra projects.

Feedback we got:

- Attendees found the beginner/introductory material really helpful.

- The Monorepo workflow seems to be much more approachable for new-comers. One of the main pieces of feedback to the “From 0 to LLVM” demo is the fact that the current recommended way was too finicky and error-prone especially for beginners. Seeing the git monorepo be a single command to clone, a single command to cmake, and a single ‘ninja all check-all’ to get going seemed to go over better.

- There’s a lot of appetite for deeper understanding of the LLVM architecture, and how to use it effectively. The audience was looking forward to being able to deep-dive on a range of things in the LLVM project: how the IR-level optimisation passes work, how to write clang-tidy plugins, how to use thin-lto, embedding LLVM for JIT compilation, etc.

We’re scheduling the next one in a month’s time, and I’ll be posting the proposed agenda next as soon as we get more details on what’s going to be most impactful and interesting to the audience next time.

Cheers!

[0] http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#for-developers-to-work-with-a-git-monorepo

-- Dean