Important talks and articles for first time Swift Contributors

The topic of compilers was really new to me but I wanted to be a Swift contributor. So, I started learning more about how compilers work and try to solve a couple of StarterBugs.

I watched a lot of talks that helped me a lot to understand compilers better and especially those that are related to contributing to Swift, so I wanted to share them with you to help newcomers like me and if anyone has any talks or tips that are recommended, please share them in the comments. :))

Talks

Articles

Thank you all for this great community and good luck fixing bugs :)

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This post is also quite helpful: What should I learn if I want to contribute to the Swift compiler?

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It's such a great thread! Thanks for sharing.

If I may toot my own horn, I also wrote a long-ish comment here that might be helpful. Getting Started with Swift Compiler Development - #2 by typesanitizer

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Aside: I don't get why this is marked off-topic, this seems perfectly on-topic to me. :slight_smile:

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It may have been brought up before, but we should start a page in the docs directory to collect links like this, there’s a lot of useful advice for new contributors on the forums, but it can be hard to find.

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Thank you, I edited the post.

I'll also add it to the post. Thanks for sharing :)

Yep, docs/DevelopmentTips.md is kinda' intended to be the "hub" for this kind of thing (or at least, that's my mental model), but it is a bit barebones at the moment.

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I didn't even know it existed. I think it should be updated and mentioned in the official README.md as this will help a lot of newcomers.

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On second thought, I am very tempted to write a Compiler Documentation Manifesto. Just a few scattered documents are no good if there is no meaningful organization. What one needs is a map, not just a list of points of interest.

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That would be awesome!!!

I'd suggest opening this as a StarterDoc in JIRA and this will be a really good contribution in my opinion.

I think the swift-internals repository was intended for this purpose, but it's fallen dormant:

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The articles written by @Brian_Gesiak (aka modocache out there) are as well a great resource to get you started on Swift Compiler dev. You can find them at modocache.io.

As well, he streams on LLVM-development related topics which give you a great insight into how to navigate the code-base + debugging tips, which can be as well useful during swift compiler dev: Twitch and YouTube.

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Please check out this post