I am excited to announce a new fellowship program we are running, funded by the CppAlliance Foundation.

The program is modeled around the structure of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) but focused specifically towards compilers and Clang in particular. This year, the program will focus on exciting and impactful projects that can directly improve the day-to-day coding experience of C++ developers.

Compilers are often viewed as “black boxes” reserved for the elite, but our group has always operated on the belief that with the right scaffolding, anyone can contribute to the tools they use every day.

Building Open Source Capacity

We aim to find a healthy balance between motivation, experience, and perseverance. Our goal is to help even complete novices dive into systems programming and compiler engineering. We know that small, well-mentored tasks lead to early wins: interns gain confidence, maintainers gain useful patches, and the whole project benefits. This program formalizes that pattern and creates a repeatable path for new contributors.

What Fellows Will Learn

This is not a “sandbox” internship where code disappears into a private branch. Our goal is upstream-first. Fellows will undergo a rigorous immersion into professional open-source engineering:

  • Practical Version Control & Collaboration: Master Git, GitHub workflows, and the nuances of code review etiquette.
  • Technical Communication: Learning the art of the “Proposal”—writing concise technical documents and documenting work so others can build on it.
  • Open-Source Contribution: Preparing patches, working with upstream maintainers, and landing changes in projects like Clang, clang-tidy, or CppInterOp.
  • Project Execution: Moving from a well-scoped implementation to delivering a public tutorial or demo.

A Perspective on “Habits”

From my perspective, the most valuable outcomes of this fellowship are not just polished code or a new line on a CV—they are the habits. Code can eventually become technical debt, but high-quality engineering habits are permanent. We want to instill:

  1. Iterative Design: The ability to make conservative, stable changes to massive codebases.
  2. Collaboration Across Timezones: Working effectively within a global, distributed community.
  3. The Discipline of the Merge: The professional stamina required to follow an idea through a dozen rounds of review until it is finally accepted upstream.
  4. AI-aware Coding: Finding a good synergy between the AI-driven code development that helps the learning process but also accelerates development.

With enough motivation and perseverance, I expect our fellows will be making their first impactful open-source contributions very soon.

We can’t wait to see what you build!

Interested in applying? Check out the Fellowship Landing Page and our Open Projects.