IREE moving out of OpenXLA

[Jacques Pienaar]

Hey everyone,

IREE now has more than four times more contributors from outside Google than inside. But some of the development processes are still rooted in a Google-centric development flow. As was discussed at the recent IREE community meeting, this causes friction, constraints, confusion and overhead without return. As such the primary maintainers have decided to start the discussion around moving IREE to a vendor neutral venue where it can continue to evolve.

While this is rooted in practical needs related to execution and scaling of the project, it is our hope that by taking this step, we can also provide a path for related projects and groups that have grown organically around the ML-MLIR tooling to join up and benefit from a common center of mass. There are many things that these projects have in common, and having an explicitly neutral home could enable better collaboration for the community to better manage contributions, development (including around shared processes like MLIR revision bumps), and CI/CD workflows.

This is just the start of the discussion though. While we (Jacques and Stella) have discussed potential ways to go about this, we’d like to go public with the intention before getting so far down the path that it is hard for other stakeholders to engage.

There will be a sequence of biweekly open meetings for all interested parties to discuss. That will be announced on iree-discuss and added to the community calendar shortly. Folks that are interested to find out more ahead of time can contact Stella and myself. We will also be executing on a variety of short term strategies in the coming months to point things in this direction, and we wanted to be upfront about the motivations and the invitation to participate.

– Jacques and Stella 

bcc: openxla-discuss.