What's going on with EuroLLVM costs?

Community EuroLLVM
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@rengolin just pointed out to me that EuroLLVM is more expensive to attend than CGO, the flagship compiler conference. For reference, the most expensive registration for GCO is £580 (£100 off if you’re an ACM or IEEE member), for a five-day event.

I think the first EuroLLVM that I attended was free. The next was £60. This was quite approachable for individual contributors and hobbyists and it was a great community gathering. The latest one is $600 for non-student individuals, which is out of reach of a lot of the kinds of people that I want to meet at these events. I would absolutely not have been able to attend if the price had been anywhere near this high back then.

I was under the impression that the LLVM Foundation was taking in large amounts of money from corporate sponsors to be able to subsidise these events, but this looks more expensive than similar-sized conferences that are run as profit-making activities.

At this price, they exclude basically everyone who is not either a funded student (the one in Bristol a few years ago was $50 for students, this one is $250, which means that it’s unaffordable to most students paying for their own travel) or paid by a wealthy corporation. It’s not feasible for most individual contributors to an open-source project.

The in-person meetings are an important mechanism for new contributors to get involved with the community, meet mentors, and even begin a career path that leads to them working for a company that can afford the $800 registration fee. I don’t feel comfortable that the pricing structure excludes people who are in the position I was when I started contributing to the project back in 2008.

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The first few ones were free because we not only got enough sponsorship (for venue, equipment, t-shirts and an event), but also because we didn’t waste money.

We went to cheap venues or universities, we relied on volunteering helpers and we used cheap AV equipment.

Funny enough, this all changed once we co-hosted with CGO in Barcelona. Their costs were stratospheric (a mic daily rate was as expensive as the mic itself, on Amazon). But it has not gone down since.

I don’t understand why we need to host on a central Mariott in front of a beautiful park in Vienna. The room rates are also absurd, with the hotel literally next door offering a fraction of the “discounted” price. This also happened in Glasgow last year.

Honestly, this is why I didn’t go. My company wasn’t going to pay for it (it’s not a core compiler conference) and I was not willing to pay it out of my pocket. I did go to the MLIR hackathon in Edinburgh beforehand, though, that was free (thanks for organizing, @TobiasGrosser), but now the hackathon is also being charged a few hundred dollars extra.

:man_shrugging:

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Speaking not as anyone who has ever organized anything: I’m sure a chunk of the conference cost goes to the AV crew, and I think that the videos are well done and an asset to the community. Another big chunk is for the food; for the main 2-day part of the US 2023 meeting, LLVM provided two continental breakfasts, two elaborate lunches, and a dinner party with alcohol. I think it’s rare for a conference to provide that much free (and good quality) food. I had lunches like that at ICSE in Montreal, but the banquet was not included. ESEC/FSE last December had two not-very-exciting sandwich choices for lunch, and again banquet was extra (I didn’t go, I was meeting family that night).

OTOH it’s really not appropriate to compare the LLVM Dev Meetings with high-end academic conferences. CGO, ICSE, ESEC/FSE publish a huge amount of peer-reviewed academic research; at the Dev Meeting we have talks and round tables.

The LLVM Foundation does receive a bunch of contributions from corporate sponsors (including my employer) but running two annual conferences is not all they do with it, and certainly not all they want to do with it. The transparency is not what it could be; I see board meeting minutes published but not a budget of any kind, so I have no visibility into what gets spent where.

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Until not that long ago, finance was pretty well published here I believe: Public Documents | LLVM Foundation
I don’t know if the information is available elsewhere now?

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The main issue is that everything is made in the US by US companies. I don’t understand why the AV team needs to fly in from the US and can’t be hired locally (if the foundation did that in Portugal I would be very offended). Same goes for the PCO.

If the conference was organized together with local partners, the registration would be less than half the price for sure. I understand it’s easier to not deal with local partners, but I share the same concerns about cost. Academic conferences are always organized by locals and it kinda works well.

Another thing: Glasgow was not a very good choice of location. It has very few direct flights to European cities. Doesn’t make sense in my opinion. Flights were around €600 from here.

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Last one I see there is May 2022.

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I’m not involved in the organizing, but from what I recall, part of the issue is scaling up the capacity for more attendees.

Through 2017, EuroLLVM was usually (maybe always?) hosted in universities, with the assistance of some members of the community with ties to that university. But, those last few years, the number of people who were coming (or wanted to come) was getting really uncomfortable to fit in the spaces the universities could provide. I do recall 2017 being especially overstuffed.

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I’m happy to answer questions about costs for Euro LLVM or other LLVM Foundation financials

CGO is being held in Scotland which is an inexpensive area to host a conference right now. Two years ago (so for EuroLLVM 2023), we did an exhaustive venue search of many countries and we picked Scotland because it was very affordable and we had uncertainty about attendance. A lot of people were upset with that decision as it was in the UK again.

Without full visibility into CGO’s expenses, I can’t really comment on how they set their pricing. However, 580 pounds is for 2.5 days of conference, not a 5 day event, and the workshops are additional. It is also single track as far as I can tell. 580 pounds is roughly 737 USD, which is not far off our most expensive EuroLLVM ticket.

Since 2019, prices for conferences have almost doubled. I made this chart for the sponsors meeting a few months ago (its for the US Dev Mtg).

Screenshot 2024-01-31 at 10.45.16 AM
Screenshot 2024-01-31 at 10.45.16 AM956×638 35.7 KB

Unfortunately, I don’t have the same chart for Euro LLVM, but you would need to consider that Euro LLVM moves to different countries each year, so it’s a little harder to really compare each place.

Euro LLVM 2024 prices are actually below our per person cost. We also give away many free tickets to the event. The majority of the speakers get a free ticket, which I don’t think is the same for many other conferences (not sure about CGO).

I encourage anyone who is in a financial situation where the ticket prices are not accessible to email events@llvm.org. We can try to help.

A previous poster is correct that while we used to heavily subsidize the ticket prices for LLVM Dev Mtgs, we are trying to move away from this so that we have money to spend on on our other programs. We are also growing the LLVM Foundation to address the needs of the community. While I get paid a small salary, I personally have donated a lot of my time, but I am overworked and need more support. Things can’t continue on this path and we need to run the LLVM Foundation in a smarter way.

I feel the need to comment on a few things posted previously as well, but will do it in a separate thread.

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Hotel rates are high across the board. While I can understand wanting to go with a cheaper rate, not using the conference hotel puts us in a poor negotiating position when it comes to future events. The more rooms you can guarantee, the more likely they will even rent you the space. We get outright rejections because we don’t book enough rooms.

For the workshop, most of the ticket prices goes towards food. That amount is not even the cost of hosting the workshops, which wouldn’t even be possible without hosting the actual conference at the hotel.

We place a high value on the videos that are produced from the event. As EuroLLVM travels to different countries, we don’t know who would be a good videographer in each country. So yes, we do bring our own video team. However, we do not bring all our own A/V staff. We use the hotel or other 3rd party person for that. I’m not even sure you could get someone cheaper, but in some cases you get what you pay for.

As for PGO, this isn’t where the majority of the money spent is going to. I’m also located in the US, so working with a team that knows our program and is in my time zone is a priority. Hiring a random PGO in each country would be a lot of wasted time and unknown outcome.

This is not true. PGO and videography is not 50% of our costs.

I know your were disappointed by the choice of location, but I think I have explained this in previous posts why we chose this spot. It was mostly driven by costs and uncertainty about attendance due to travel budget cuts and the pandemic. This was only the 2nd conference post pandemic lockdowns.

As a nonprofit our financials are public information. However, it appears that this information was not getting posted. I’ll see if we can get that corrected.

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Thank you Tanya.

Let me just give some concrete numbers: my university charges €2220/day for a 300-person room. If you have 200 attendees, that’s €11/person/day.

Universities usually have quite cheap spaces and catering. I think we could explore these options with the help of locals.

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A mostly fly-by comment from somebody who regularly attends both LLVM events and CGO (and other academic conferences) as well as serving on various committees.

CGO is held in conjunction with PPoPP and HPCA (and CC, which counts as workshop and has had a separate registration fee the past couple of years). So the base ticket gives access to three conferences, and there are three parallel tracks for talks. Also included are the poster reception, a dinner and sometimes a social activity. The cost varies by ~50% depending on whether the conference is held in Europe or in the US, mostly affected by the cost of the venue. The main observable difference is that (1) academic conferences mostly do not give away free tickets, moreover one must present an accepted paper, and therefore pay the registration fee and (2) there is no professional A/V production and the setup is the venue default + student volunteers (who sometimes get a free or a discounted ticket).

As of today, I’d say the scale of LLVM events is similar to that of the CGO conference cluster. The latter is larger in terms of the overall number of people, but not by an order of magnitude, so I am not surprised by the price tag.

By the way, @TobiasGrosser is the general chair of CGO and may be able to share some insight. Otherwise, there is a session called “ business meeting” in most academic conferences that discusses precisely these kinds of issues, and any registered attendee can come and provide feedback.

Overall, I have also noticed the registration cost going up for LLVM events in the past couple of years. My overall impression that it models itself after CppCon more than academic conferences (for info, CppCon was not only offering free tickets to speakers, but also free accommodation in the conference hotel and an economy flight ticket; though the registration fee starts at $2k).

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To be clear, I’m not complaining about the value, just making a comment on the price.

In the first EuroLLVM we had less than 100 people. We managed to pay for venue, food, some travel and t-shirts and still give back half of the funding without charging money. Later on, we did many EuroLLVM in universities (Paris, London, Edinburgh, Saarbruken) and hotels. The costs were very cheap at unis, and reasonable at hotels.

The main driver for costs in Barcelona was the different category of hotel with the conference, quality of AV, and food. That was mandated by co-hosting with CGO, but recently, all iterations look like that, on more boring locations.

I can only talk about my personal view, which is that none of that is important. I don’t mind where we stay or what quality the recordings come out, as long as it’s reasonable to expect that students and workers from smaller companies / poorer countries can attend. I’m quite content with university food and a beer by the curbside, if that means I get to hangout with interesting people from across the globe.

I do understand enough about conference organizing to know that logistics needs safety margins to not backfire and safety margins need coin. A lot of it.

Speaking only from the initial phase (pre-foundation): The UK was chosen more based on practical terms. The first were in London because Arm was paying for it. It took some convincing to not host in Cambridge, mind you. Later, Tobias van-Kokh was organizer and wanted to host in Edinburgh, then we got Paris, Goldsmiths and Saarbrucken, all because we knew the place and could run it from the ground.

We did not have a local team in Barcelona, and that’s why it was so expensive. We don’t have a local team in Austria, I imagine the same was true for Glasgow. This is key to make costs cheap.

I’ve run an event in Portugal once, and it was a pain to find the right place for the right price, even in a country that I speak the same language. I’m sure if I had asked @nlopes, he’d have done it for half the cost in a better place wasting a lot less time. This is not a hyperbole, I’m being truly honest here.

So, my view is simple: If people want to go to nice places (Vienna, Zagreb, Nice, Pisa, Barcelona, etc), without a local team, and have a blast, then they’re better be ready to spend the Christmas money. But if people are happy to go to boring places (London, Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh) with a local team to meet a lot of interesting people, then they better find a local team to organize it.

Fosdem hosts thousands of people for free in the same boring university for years with good quality AV and food trucks. It’s the local team, the low cost of good food and hotels and the willingness of all people to look past the glamour and meet different people.

What to me doesn’t make sense is to go to Glasgow for the price of a small car to talk only to the same folks I talked last time because no one else can pay the fees.

If I’m not being exposed to a diverse and interesting crowd, I’m not going to pay good money for it. For actual research, I’d rather publish in other compiler conferences that my company and academia cares more about.

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It sounds like you mean a local team organizing it means volunteers organizing it which of course cost nothing. Because in the end, you either pay someone to do it or you have volunteers. The reason Euro LLVM moved toward paid organizers is because it got big. It was too big for many universities to adequately host and also often required being held when classes were not in session. In fact, we were on track to become larger than CGO (depending upon if you count co-located conferences or not).

The logistics team we use is experts in conference/event planning. They know how to find venues , negotiate contracts, etc. None of this is trivial and something that a volunteer who isn’t doing it day in and day out, can do well. I don’t think it’s fair to trivialize it. Perhaps if you are dealing with a university that you work for that it is easier, but again, we had outgrown many of these spaces. Comparing us to FOSEDM isn’t a fair comparison.

Lastly, I find your response bordering on insulting. Little digs here and there about how boring the places are and how the cost of Glasgow was the price of a small car, how people are spending their Christmas money on it, etc. I would really prefer if you wouldn’t do that if you want to have a discussion about this. When I get responses like this, I try not to say anything and ignore, because it often gets turned back on me because “I’m over reacting” or “I’m too sensitive”, or “you can’t criticism”. This is a pattern of behavior that is driving me to not want to do this much longer.

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This costs a lot of money, especially internationally, across continents. My personal view is just that we don’t need most of it.

I did not, nor I have seen anyone here doing it. I understand very well all those costs, all I’m saying is that me and a lot of folks around here don’t really care about most of it.

EuroLLVM started as a more academically friendly conference (in content and costs) and it turned into a corporate conference (in content and costs). This means academia and disadvantaged developers will miss out. Personally, I’d rather go back to sandwihes and water fountains to get hose people back.

You know me for long enough that I expected you’d understand my communication style. The “digs” were definitely not “on you”, but on “Glasgow” being a city that not many in the UK or EU want to visit, like Dusseldorf or Napoli. Nothing wrong with those places (been there myself, loved it) but not particularly glamorous.

I hope you’re not implying that, if I don’t adhere to some internationally accepted normative behavioural pattern, I’m not welcome in this forum. As you know very well, I’m not neurotypical and my behaviour is, at best, simulated and unnatural.

It takes me a lot of time to write these things and I do so with painstaking respect for all people involved, especially the ones I care about, and that includes you too. If something came out wrong I can only apologise and try to reword again.

I know this too well and I have the same reaction. I am really sorry my response got you this impression, it really wasn’t my intention. As I said, the digs were on the places, not you or your choices. the value we get is great, the organization is super professional, the quality is beyond anything I have ever tried to do.

I did not try to discredit any of that. All I said is that I personally don’t care for any of that, and would be very happy with a much simpler conference.

I think it is and that’s why I made it. My point is that, to keep the costs down, they do the same thing every year. Same uni, same people, same equipment, same country, same food trucks, etc.I often book the same hotels, same train times, I go to the same restaurants and bars.

A lot of conferences do that and people get used to it. It helps with travel plans, visa requests, venue reservations, expectations, university collaborations, etc. For EU people to go to Brussels is really easy and cheap, for international people, it’s a lot cheaper to go to Brussels (or London/Paris) than Glasgow.

I’m surprised your planning team did not realise that. Maybe they’re not from the EU? Everyone here knows Glasgow and Dusseldorf are much harder to reach than Edinburgh or Frankfurt. This was my issue with Saarbrucken, but it turned out a wonderful EuroLLVM (thanks @jdoerfert!).

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This is good information. Thank you for sharing it. So it sounds like the amount of “tracks” is similar.

Yes, we are not an academic conference. We don’t offer publication, so an incentive to give a talk is with a free ticket. We are also using our revenue to fund other aspects of the LLVM open source project. So attending an LLVM Dev mtg isn’t just about what you get out of the conference itself, but it also has an impact on LLVM through the LLVM Foundation’s other programs and attracting companies to donate to fund these programs.

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FWIW, I was being literal here. This was definitely not a “dig”. Just quoted EuroLLVM at £2300 all inclusive. This is literally the cost of a small car, or a Christmas family budget.

With the cost of life crisis in Europe, not many people have that kind of disposable cash for a conference if their companies aren’t going to pay for it, and companies aren’t paying for conferences that are not strictly necessary, especially such an expensive one.

With many entering into credit card debt to pay for electricity bills, this is not a joke.

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The quality of the AV production we got for quite a few years now has been amazing.

However I have no idea of the cost associated with it? How much less would the conference cost if we had no AV at all?

I’m wondering why do we place a high value on these videos actually?

We could also ask the author to self-record ahead of time and publish these on YouTube alongside the slides after the conference for example: the cost/benefit ratio would seem very favorable (if the pro AV we get is actually expensive).

To some extent, right now the people who are going to the conference are paying for the cost of delivering content to people who will consume it for free after the conference.

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Just one comment regarding hotel rates. As an employee working for a public research organization, we are bound to a limit for accommodation costs which is set by the Federal Ministry of Fiance. This also applies for employees at German universities. Knowing that this limit cannot always be met (which is often not possible with the hotel rates e.g. in the Silicon Valley or when large trade fairs ), one can argue why the limit must be exceeded (e.g. because no cheaper option is available in reasonable proximity to the conference hotel). For Vienna, however, this can hardly be argued due to the good public transportation system and the numerous hotel options close to the conference hotel. So even for funded/sponsored attendees it is not always allowed to book the conference hotel.

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FOSDEM is an order of magnitude larger. For a closer comparison, the GNU Tools cauldron last year was £75 per person for a three-track event, which was somewhat smaller than EuroLLVM. Rooms in cheap student accommodation were available for people that couldn’t afford or didn’t want to spend money on a more expensive hotel.

Or BSDCan, which is a similar scale to EuroLLVM and is $200 (an extra $150 if you’re a self-declared corporate attendee and want to subsidise the conference) with far less corporate sponsorship than LLVM.

If the benefit going up to $800 in expensive hotels is better video recordings and a fancy dinner, and the cost is excluding a lot of potential attendees and exacerbating the divide between community contributors and those paid by Silicon Valley companies, I don’t believe that the LLVM Foundation has made the right choice.

The US dev meeting was always held in expensive places and out of reach of most community contributors but EuroLLVM was a much more inclusive event. I am sad that we’ve lost that.

As others have said, we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis and a large wave of tech-sector redundancies. This seems like exactly the wrong time to be organising a conference that is too expensive to attend without a deep-pocketed corporate backer. I would not have been able to justify attendance at this price when I was at Microsoft, I’m not sure who can.

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I find conference talks a valuable source of information that is hard to come by otherwise. Recordings make the conference more inclusive both in the present (for people who are not attending), and in the future (for people who probably didn’t even had a chance to attend a talk happened N years ago).

These days such inclusivity is even more important. I believe we have a whole segment of community which is facing absolutely ridiculous visa problems since Ukraine invasion started. For instance, I can’t attend anything that happens in US, because waiting list in my local US embassy is 1 year long. Unfortunately, EU is not much better either. Male Ukraine citizens are in even worse situation, not being able to leave Ukraine at all because of martial law.

Pro AV gives us very good sound quality, and it is valuable for non-native English speakers watching the talks. Bad audio makes it significantly harder to understand the speaker. It would be very nice to ensure decent audio quality if we are going to ask people to self-record.

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