How to Contribute

There are a few fairly easy ways for newcomers to substantially improve ForwardDiff, and they all revolve around writing functions for Dual numbers. This section provides brief tutorials on how to make these contributions.

If you're new GitHub, here's an outline of the workflow you should use:

1. Fork ForwardDiff
2. Make a new branch on your fork, named after whatever changes you'll be making
3. Apply your code changes to the branch on your fork
4. When you're done, submit a PR to ForwardDiff to merge your fork into ForwardDiff's master branch.

Adding New Derivative Definitions

In general, new derivative implementations for Dual are automatically defined via simple symbolic rules. ForwardDiff accomplishes this by looping over the rules provided by the DiffRules package and using them to auto-generate Dual definitions. Conveniently, these auto-generated definitions are also automatically tested.

Thus, in order to add a new derivative implementation for Dual, you should define the appropriate derivative rule(s) in DiffRules, and then check that calling the function on Dual instances delivers the desired result.

Depending on your function, ForwardDiff's auto-definition mechanism might need to be expanded to support it. If this is the case, file an issue/PR so that ForwardDiff's maintainers can help you out.