Red Hat Engineer Nikita Popov Now The Lead Maintainer For LLVM

Following a proposal that began last month, Red Hat engineer Nikita Popov was nominated to become the new lead maintainer for LLVM. Following unaminous approval, as of last week in LLVM Git he's been appointed the official lead maintainer for this critical open-source compiler stack.

The proposal by Aaron Ballman for nominating Nikita Popov laid out the case:

"LLVM is one of the most critical parts of the overall project and its list of code owners has been outdated for some time now. Chris Lattner (@clattner) has done a wonderful job in the “everything not covered by someone else” role since LLVM’s inception, but I believe his bandwidth has diminished over the years and now is the right time for a new leader to step up and help drive a full refresh of LLVM’s list of maintainers.

To that end, I would like to nominate Nikita Popov (@nikic) to be the lead maintainer for the LLVM subproject. Nikita has been a long-time, active contributor to LLVM 42, has deep technical knowledge across many of the components, performs quality reviews, knows many of the other maintainers within the project, runs key community services like https://llvm-compile-time-tracker.com/ 26, and has largely already been doing the work we expect of a lead maintainer.

Further, I would like to nominate Chris Lattner to be an emeritus lead maintainer for LLVM, similar to how we’ve transitioned Doug Gregor and Richard Smith as Clang’s former leads. The importance of Chris’ contributions to the community cannot be overstated – we wouldn’t be here were it not for Chris’ efforts. Thank you for all the years of effort and leadership!"

Merged last week was updating the documentation to now cite Nikita Popov as the lead maintainer for all parts of LLVM not covered by other maintainers. LLVM project founder Chris Lattner is also now formally recognized as the emeritus lead maintainer of LLVM.

Nikita Popov serves as an engineer at Red Hat where he works on LLVM. Clang, and Rust. Nikita Popov has also served as a core developer of PHP.