AsiaLLVM anyone? South America? Africa?

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Talking to a few folks at EuroLLVM this year, it seems like there’s an appetite to have a conference centred in Asia.

One of the main reasons we started EuroLLVM was to make it much easier for European students to go to an LLVM conference every year and that has been a resounding success. But Asian students still struggle with visa issues, travel costs (as did Europeans before), so why not just to extend it once again?

There are a lot of places we could host that have reasonable visa policies, which would make it much more attractive as a conference. We want to increase the number of locals, not completely remove the present of foreigners.

In my experience, South Asia is similar to South America in how tourism works, with tourism costs being orders of magnitude from local costs (not just 2-3x like Europe & North America), so there a local team would be essential. Not to mention stark cultural issues, that are much wider than the strong link between Europe and North America.

While we’re on the subject, a few people suggested Brazil as a potential destination. There are strong compiler groups in Belo Horizonte and Campinas, a strong conference culture in the south (ex. FISL) and large technological centres in Sao Paulo and Rio. Flying into Brazil is not trivial, but the same is true for the other way around, which is the whole point.

Anyone from Africa? Perhaps we can start with meetups and grow into larger groups into a conference-sized event?

With the population of the global south being disproportionately affected by travel restrictions, costs and opportunities, hosting conferences there would not only help them present their work, but participate more actively on our community.

@Fernando @Groverkss @TobiasGrosser @jpienaar @tonic

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I personally might not attend any of them, but I certainly appreciate the raised concern. Visa complications and jetlag are very real for people coming from outside of Europe and US. Having more geographical diversity would definitely help.

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Thank you for the post, Renato.

I’ll share my experience with visas as an Indian student. I received funding for 2 EuroLLVMs, 1 US dev meeting and 3 times to attend HiPEAC. I could only attend 1 EuroLLVM out of these where I got lucky with visa timings. Visas appointments generally have unreasonable wait times (US visa wait time right now in Hyderabad is 276 days Visa Appointment Wait Times) and require evidence of a lot of funds (Spanish embassy requires 113 euros per day of stay and a minimum of 1020 euros).

Also, Indian students cannot receive LLVM student grants anymore (This is an issue with Indian Banks AFAIU).

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Interestingly, the organizing team at the LLVM Social Bangalore has been floating the idea of having a conference in Bangalore. As there are hundreds of compiler engineers in Bangalore, there was a strong interest from compiler engineers from several companies.

Some professors have also shown interest in helping us with the conference. I’ll schedule a zoom meeting in the next few days for anyone who is interested in making it happen. Feel free to reach out on #india channel on discord.

As pointed out in previous comments, because of the the Visa issues and travel grants for Indians, there is greater interest to have a conference here. Even at the llvm-cgo conference it came up, when we were reaching out to presenters from India. Another issue is that getting travel grants for employees is getting difficult because of increasing cost of travel.

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I have very little knowledge of the visa arrangements between East & South Asian countries, but @lazyparser suggested that Tokyo is a good possible location for a future APAC LLVM event. In particular, it’s accessible to both Taiwanese and Chinese attendees.

After checking a map, though, Japan and India are quite far apart. :person_shrugging:

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As a South African, I’d be pro more dev meetings in more places :slight_smile: I don’t know of many contributors from there, but I’d be happy to help organize if there is enough interest.

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Just to sprinkle a little bit of trivia here: I think a long long long time ago one of the earliest “LLVM Dev Meeting” (wasn’t really called by that name then) was held in Tokyo.
Its program agenda is still sitting somewhere in llvm.org IIRC

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Cool! https://llvm.org/devmtg/2008-08-23/

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Following up from my previous comment, we plan to have a 30 minutes meeting on April 19th Friday 10pm Indian Standard Time (9:30am Pacific Time). Anyone wants to contribute to having a conference in India are welcome to join. Here is the link to . If you want to be added to the calendar invite, let me know here or in discord.

EDIT: Fixed the calendar invite link above.