Contributing

We're excited to work on Wasmtime and/or Cranelift together with you! This guide should help you get up and running with Wasmtime and Cranelift development. But first, make sure you've read the Code of Conduct!

Wasmtime and Cranelift are very ambitious projects with many goals, and while we're confident we can achieve some of them, we see many opportunities for people to get involved and help us achieve even more.

Join Our Chat

We chat about Wasmtime and Cranelift development on Zulip — join us!. You can also join specific streams:

• #wasmtime
• #cranelift

If you're having trouble building Wasmtime or Cranelift, aren't sure why a test is failing, or have any other questions, feel free to ask on Zulip. Not everything we hope to do with these projects is reflected in the code or documentation yet, so if you see things that seem missing or that don't make sense, or even that just don't work the way you expect them to, we're also interested to hear about that!

As always, you're more than welcome to open an issue too!

Finally, we have biweekly project meetings, hosted on Zoom, for Wasmtime and Cranelift. For more information, see our meetings agendas/minutes repository. Please feel free to contact us via Zulip if you're interested in joining!

Finding Something to Hack On

If you're looking for something to do, these are great places to start:

• Issues labeled "good first issue" — these issues tend to be simple, what needs to be done is well known, and are good for new contributors to tackle. The goal is to learn Wasmtime's development workflow and make sure that you can build and test Wasmtime.

• Issues labeled "help wanted" — these are issues that we need a little help with!

If you're unsure if an issue is a good fit for you or not, feel free to ask in a comment on the issue, or in chat.

Mentoring

We're happy to mentor people, whether you're learning Rust, learning about compiler backends, learning about machine code, learning about wasm, learning about how Cranelift does things, or all together at once.

We categorize issues in the issue tracker using a tag scheme inspired by Rust's issue tags. For example, the E-easy marks good beginner issues, and E-rust marks issues which likely require some familiarity with Rust, though not necessarily Cranelift-specific or even compiler-specific experience. E-compiler-easy marks issues good for beginners who have some familiarity with compilers, or are interested in gaining some :-).

See also the full list of Cranelift labels.

Also, we encourage people to just look around and find things they're interested in. This a good time to get involved, as there aren't a lot of things set in stone yet.