This is awesome!
Without further context, I’m seeing a few things:
- Commit rate has been pretty stable around 100/day for the past two years. This isn’t surprising, since LLVM is a mature project and has a vibrant community.
- Peaks just before releases, and lows during year’s end, as expected.
- Unreviewed commits have been steadily reducing, and seems to be half of what it was 2 years ago (40% → 20%).
- Bulk of unreviewed commits is pushes directly to main, which would be mostly gone with this change.
- It’s unclear if requiring PRs will reduce the number of unreviewed commits, or will just move the bulk to unreviewed PRs merged.
- First time contributors per day was slightly larger initially, but hasn’t changed much.
- I’m guessing this also includes people who contributed to LLVM before Github, but it’s hard to say how much.
- Unique contributors is 3x more than 2 years ago, to 3000, which is a lot!. Not sure how this compares to other upstream projects.
The data shows the growth is steady and healthy. There does not seem to be big problems in growing the community, and the organic nature probably means we’re doing a lot of things right.
To me personally, this seems to confirm we don’t need to address urgent community building issues and, as others have pointed out, the benefits of AI in gaining new contributors would be lower value than the problems it brings. If we had evidence of a dwindling state, we could consider pushing it prematurely, but I don’t believe we need it.