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).
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.