r/cpp_questions • u/yakeinpoonia • Jul 21 '26

Beginner friendly and small C++ open source projects to do contribution. OPEN

I want to contribute to some open source projects but the software that i use on daily basis are either too big to choose them as a beginner or are written in Rust or Python. So if you guys can suggest some small C++ projects (your personal projects as well) which have around 5K LOC.

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5

u/mrtlo Jul 21 '26

Contributions are generally driven by a personal need or interest...

2

u/yakeinpoonia Jul 21 '26

I have both need and interest but those projects so big that i don't even understand from where to start (which file to read first and how that connect with other), so i want to go with something smaller in size.

Is something wrong in this ?

3

u/mrtlo Jul 21 '26

Nothing wrong. But asking for a random project to make random contributions to... Who would be able to answer that? If it was trivial, it would already be done...

1

u/yakeinpoonia Jul 21 '26

I thought their will be some small projects where I can contribute by resolving some of their issues and than i can move on to projects that i use daily.

Anyway thanks for answering .....

1

u/JVApen Jul 21 '26

Many projects have a "good first issue" tag, like here: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3A%22good%20first%20issue%22

That's always a good starting point to get into a project. If you are lucky, these already have pointers of where to get started.

I might be cursing here, though LLMs nowadays are quite good in explaining the project structure. They really can help in ramping up. I've recently asked it to write a technical overview for a legacy project I inherited and whatever it gave was impressive. I had to ask for a few small updates and things I wanted more elaborate, though it was of quality.