[LLVMdev] Contributing to LLVM

[Bill Wendling]

On Aug 4, 2008, at 10:29 PM, Shrutarshi Basu wrote:

> Hello all,
> I'm a rising sophomore CS/Engineering student in the US and I'm
> interested in programming languages/ compilers.I think the LLVM would
> be a great project for me to contribute to, both to learn something
> and help the project. Unfortunately, I don't know much about
> compilers, much less anything which would allow me to make a
> significant contribution. I've started reading the Dragon book and
> over the summer I wrote a recursive descent parser for a project's
> config files. I would appreciate it if some of you could give me
> guidelines for what I should learn/do both in terms of theory and in
> using practical tools. In particular I'm looking to become familiar
> with both general compilers and the LLVM to be able to do a project
> for next year's GSoC. I'll start by compiling the code and haunting
> this list.

Hi Basu,
>

Read the books you have access to -- Advanced Compiler Design and  
Implementation by Steven Muchnick is a good one. Because you're a  
sophomore, you should take a compiler class at your university.  
Compilers are a specialized field of computer science. It comes with a  
nomenclature and set of skills all its own and which you will need to  
know before you can make any progress at it. Classes and studying  
should get you there.

Good luck!
-bw