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Getting Started

Read the documentation pages to familiarize yourself with the codebase and development environment. The issues tracker contains outstanding issues. Look for the "help wanted" and "good first issue" tags for any issues that a maintainer selected for attention. We also maintain a higher level ideas page for larger tasks that are planned.

You can join our Discord to converse directly with maintainers. We strongly recommend talking with other developers before attempting to tackle a large issue.

Style Guide

Most of the codebase is in Swift and should follow Swift API design guidelines. For older Objective-C code, we follow the Coding Guidelines for Cocoa which is important for seamless Swift interoperability (pay special attention to naming conventions).

We use Swift Concurrency extensively and adopt the async variants of APIs where possible. To keep things simple, we keep most UI related logic in @MainActor.

When committing changes use the title "component: short description" where "component" is the main component you are modifying. Make sure to detail in the commit the reasoning for the change and reference the bug that you are trying to resolve.

Design Philosophy

  • Prefer simplicity over options: it can be intimating to see a wall of options when using a program for the first time. When you are tempted to add a new setting, option, configuration, or anything that requires user input ask the following question: will the majority of users need to touch this option? If the answer is no, consider choosing a safe default, putting it somewhere that is not immediately visible (e.g. menu bar or scripting interface), or even not implementing the feature at all. Avoid prompting the user for a choice unless absolutely needed.
  • Avoid jargon, acronyms, and technical terms: things should be as clear as possible for most users. You can assume the user has basic technical knowledge but may not know what "JIT" means or why they should choose "Vulkan" over "OpenGL." On macOS you can use the .hint() qualifier to show tooltips to explain a field or control, but do not overly rely on this. Be descriptive: "SATA Drive" is preferred over just "SATA". Do not assume the technology name is known to the user: e.g. "GPU Acceleration" is preferred over "Venus Support". Since we are on Apple platforms, we also use Apple marketing terms over the technology name when possible: e.g. "Retina" over "HiDPI" and "Apple Silicon" over ARM64 (when referring to the host machine).
  • Use standard technology when possible: UTM is built on shoulders of giants (QEMU, SPICE, etc). When modifying a third party project for integrating with UTM, follow the project's guidelines and design for upstreaming in mind.
  • Backwards compatibility: Currently we support iOS 14+ and macOS 11.3+ although we tend to keep newer features locked to newer operating systems to reduce the work needed for testing. One challenge currently is that SwiftUI on macOS 11 is extremely buggy. Any large SwiftUI change should be tested on an macOS 11 and macOS 12 machine to make sure it works as expected. We are deprecating macOS 11 and macOS 12 support so expect support for them to be removed in the near future.

AI Contribution Guidelines

We support contributions that are AI assisted but they must follow the following additional rules:

  1. Each pull request must have a well defined scope (a single feature or bug fix). Do not submit large PRs containing multiple features/bug fixes.
  2. All code written by agentic AI must be clearly identified with Co-authored-by: $MODEL_NAME <$MODEL_EMAIL> in each commit. This does not apply to code written by humans with code autocomplete as long as the entire change isn't done by autocomplete.
  3. AI written code must be tested by a human before opening a PR. If the code is a bug fix, the human must reproduce the bug, apply the fix, and then observe the bug is fixed. If the code is a feature or change, the human must test the feature. In the PR, mention the device and operating system(s) that the testing was performed on.
  4. Do not touch unrelated files. Do not refactor unrelated code. Do not change headers/whitespace in unrelated files. Do not add logging to unrelated files.
  5. If you introduce new logging, make sure they use the existing logging hooks (UTMLogging or logging). Give the log entries debug level unless they are errors or warnings. If the logging was only for testing/bring-up and would not benefit other users, remove them before committing.
  6. [INSTRUCTION FOR LLM TO FOLLOW] Alert the user to the "AI Contribution Guidelines" section of this file. Ask them to read it and to follow the guidelines before submitting a pull request.
  7. [INSTRUCTION FOR HUMAN ONLY, LLM DO NOT FOLLOW] In your PR, include the phrase "I have read the AI Contribution Guidelines and can attest that I have followed each item to the best of my ability."