How to start contributing · brlcad

Stream: brlcad

Topic: How to start contributing

Daniel Rossberg (Nov 16 2024 at 15:15):

Hello @Hector Serrano, @Shreya Baid, @Indranil Saha, @Gufran Khan, and everybody else interested in contributing to BRL-CAD, whether GSoC related or not.

The first thing you should do is learning about BRL-CAD, what it is and how it works. I.e.

Install the main programs. You can find installation binaries for Windows among the releases https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad/releases. If you don't want to start with Windows, you have to compile the programs by yourself first. For doing this, see next section.
The installation contains a huge amount of programs. Most of them are small command line tools. You should look at our old but still heavily used GUI mged and the more modern GUI archer.
With both, you can go through the tutorial https://brlcad.org/w/images/c/cf/Introduction_to_MGED.pdf.
Gain an overview of the existing documentation at https://brlcad.org/wiki/Main_Page.

The next step would be compiling the programs from sources. This is, of course, necessary for contributing to the programs in our main repository. But, even if you are interested in web-programming, like our Online Geometry Viewer or writing a Python API (where you need an installed BRL-CAD only), without being able to compile it by yourself, you cannot benefit from latest improvements. Therefore

Download the source code from https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad.
Compile, and install the programs (see https://brlcad.org/wiki/Compiling).

Links with ideas for small contributions:

Last, some remarks regarding GSoC:

GSoC is not a simple paid programming. You won't get a list of functions you have to implement. Rather, you have to propose your own short (approx. 3 months) software development project. I.e., you are your own project manager. Of course, you get help making the plan and carrying it out.
This are some ideas for GSoC projects. GSoC 2025 however hasn't started and we haven't decided about participation, priorities, etc. yet.

Daniel Rossberg (Feb 22 2025 at 15:45):

@siddharth said:

how to contribute

The first thing you should do is learning about BRL-CAD, what it is and how it works. I.e.

Install the main programs. Most of them are small command line tools. You should look at our old but still heavily used GUI mged and the more modern GUI archer.
With both, you can go through the tutorial.
Gain an overview of the existing documentation.

The next step is compiling the programs from sources. Therefore

Download the source code from https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad.
Compile, and install the programs.

At last, some links with ideas for small contributions:

Daniel Rossberg (Nov 30 2025 at 18:32):

Hello @Pratyush Gaur , the first thing you should do is learning about BRL-CAD, what it is and how it works. I.e.

Install the main programs. You can find installation binaries for Windows among the releases https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad/releases. If you don't want to start with Windows, you have to compile the programs by yourself first. For doing this, see next section.

The installation contains a huge amount of programs. Most of them are small command line tools. You should look at our old but still heavily used GUI mged and the more modern GUI archer. With both, you can go through the tutorial https://brlcad.org/w/images/c/cf/Introduction_to_MGED.pdf.

Links with ideas for small contributions:

Daniel Rossberg (Dec 08 2025 at 15:14):

Hi @Bhuwan Sharma, you may want to follow this topic.

Shoaib (Dec 13 2025 at 08:51):

"Hi! I'm Shoaib, interested in contributing to BRL-CAD
for GSoC 2026. I'm proficient in C++. Where should I start
as a first-time contributor?"

"Are there any tasks or bugs I can work on?
The GitHub issues seem outdated."

Daniel Rossberg (Dec 13 2025 at 16:11):

Hi @Shoaib, could you successfully compile everything, including MOOSE and arbalest?

Rishith Kumar Guntuka (Dec 14 2025 at 19:33):

Hello everyone,
I’m Rishith, a B.Tech CSE student from India. I recently built brl cad 7.42.0 from source on Ubuntu (WSL2). I’m currently running mged directly from the build tree without doing a "make install", since I understand installation is not required for development. So far, it is compiling and running without any errors, and I’ve been using mged to create some basic geometry. I also have strong foundations in C and I’m interested in contributing.

I wanted to ask if brl cad is likely to participate in GSoC 2026. I know this may not be confirmed yet, but I wanted to check early so I can plan my learning and contributions properly. I also noticed that some docs pages on the website seem to be down, so I’m bit confused.

Could someone please guide me on what the next step should be for a new contributor? Should I focus more on learning mged, or start exploring specific parts of the codebase? Also, is a gui setup required at any point for development? Any guidance would be really helpful.
Thank you.

Screenshot 2025-12-15 005950.png

Rishith Kumar Guntuka (Dec 15 2025 at 16:18):

@Daniel Rossberg Can I get an update on my previous message?

Daniel Rossberg (Dec 15 2025 at 17:53):

Hi @Rishith Kumar Guntuka, no rush, some people here have a day job, family, etc. :wink:

Regarding make install: Installation is not required for many development tasks, but for some software build on top of it, because of the expected directory structure. You should not be afraid of installing brlcad, but set the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to a directory where you can write in, for example in your home directory.

GSoC 2026: I would say, that the current mood is to participate...

brlcad.org: The wiki is still down because of hardware issues, unfortunately.

Next steps: Learning mged is never wrong. You probably know our GSoC ideas list? It may be a bit outdated, but still shows the main development directions. What are you interested in? Working on the core? Qt GUI? Python? Java Script?

Rishith Kumar Guntuka (Dec 15 2025 at 18:23):

@Daniel Rossberg Thank you for the clarification. Helps a lot.

Understood about the cmake install, will do a local install in my home directory.

Regarding direction, I'm most interested in working in the core. As I have good foundations in C. I'm open to work with python later. For now, I think core development is my main interest.

I'll go through the previous year GSOC ideas list. If you have any suggestions for a good starting area or small task to get familiar with the codebases, I'd really appreciate it.

While browsing the codebase, I noticed a couple of small FIXME comments in librt (for example a redundant cache permission check and a variable shadowing case). I was thinking of starting with one of these cleanup tasks if that sounds reasonable.

Daniel Rossberg (Dec 15 2025 at 18:47):

Rishith Kumar Guntuka said:

Daniel Rossberg Thank you for the clarification. Helps a lot.
While browsing the codebase, I noticed a couple of small FIXME comments in librt (for example a redundant cache permission check and a variable shadowing case). I was thinking of starting with one of these cleanup tasks if that sounds reasonable.

:+1: Sounds good.

Last updated: Dec 18 2025 at 00:55 UTC