Contributing to Eigen

Eigen is written and maintained by volunteers. If you are willing to help, great! Here are some pointers to get you started.

Support

Perhaps the easiest way to help is to be willing to support new (and not so new) users of Eigen and answer their questions. People ask questions on the StackOverflow, or Discord. You can also improve our FAQ with questions (and answers) that arise frequently.

Users arrive with different levels of C++ and mathematics knowledge, so whatever your level of experience, you can help out with this. Do not be too worried about given wrong advice; if you are not sure that your answer is correct, just say you are not sure and others will jump in if necessary.

Documentation

In common with almost all software projects, we are struggling with writing good documentation, so we are especially keen to get help in this area. It might actually help here if you do not have years of experience with Eigen, as that makes you more in tune with the people that are reading the documentation. After answering users’ questions, as explained above, think about whether the current documentation could be improved so that the question would not have arisen. This is not always possible, but questions often point to shortcomings in our documentation.

Most of the documentation resides at https://libeigen.gitlab.io/eigen/docs-nightly and is generated by Doxygen from comments in the source code (see Developer’s Corner#Documentation tips).

There is also some documentation on this site and you are welcome to add to this. To do so, submit a merge request at https://gitlab.com/libeigen/libeigen.gitlab.io/-/merge_requests.

Bugs: triage, discussion, fixing

If you discover a bug, please report it! If you are unsure if it is a bug, you can ask on Discord first.

As of February 2021 there are almost 600 open bugs! It is hard to keep on top of them so any help in maintaining the list is very useful. The first step is to try and reproduce the bug. You may have to ask the bug reporter for information on the version of Eigen, the compiler, the OS, etc.

For some bugs (usually marked with the “decision needed” label) there is either no agreement if they shall be fixed; or they are acknowledged but different approaches to solve them exist, which might lead to different APIs or behavior. You are welcome to take part in these discussions!

If you have an idea what might cause a bug or how it possibly could be fixed, add a comment to the corresponding bug-entry. If you exactly know how to fix a bug, please send us a merge request on GitLab. Also add a unit test to avoid regressions on particular bugs. In principle, searching GitLab for bugs with the “junior job” label will give you a list of open bugs which do not require deep understanding of Eigen’s internals, yet in some cases might require expertise in different areas. Usage of this keyword will hopefully grow in the future.

We need support especially for rarely used compilers and platforms!

Testing

If you have CPU hours to spare you can make nightly runs of our testsuite. This would be especially helpful for rarely tested compilers (of course, some redundancy is appreciated here as well). See our nightly pipeline for platforms and configurations that are tested at the moment.

Writing unit tests and documentation for one of the unsupported modules might be the task with the smoothest learning curve.

Discussing API and overall design

From time to time there are discussions on Discord or on GitLab about new features or change requests in the current API. It helps to get feedback from actual users on what kind of API they expect.

Taking part in these discussions does not require being able to implement those changes!

Contributing code

If you have code to contribute (be it documentation or bug fixes or new features), then submit it as a merge request on GitLab. See the page on Git for how to produce a patch or a merge request and see the Developer’s Corner for some general advice. Code implementing new features should have reached a certain standard before we can accept them; in particular, we expect the code to include tests and documentation. If your patch or merge is being ignored, don’t be shy to remind us of it.

Unfortunately, some of the current code is not explained as clearly as we would like, especially the internal and the more complicated parts. Hopefully this will improve over time. The publications, especially the slides from Eurographics/CGLibs in Pisa, may help to gain an overview of the architecture. Do not hesitate to ask for help on Discord. If you do not understand it, chances are other people will also not understand it, so do improve the code or the documentation once you get it.

If you plan to make bigger contributions, first ask if anyone else is working on that or something related in order to reduce duplicated efforts. Also if your contribution involves major API decisions, it is generally advantageous to discuss them first.

Notice: If you own a fork that was severed from the main GitLab repo by the accidental deletion on October 2nd 2021, you can re-establish the fork relationship by following the instructions here.