Chris Lattner | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Chris Lattner atFOSDEM in 2011 | |
| Born | Christopher Arthur Lattner 1978 (age 46–47) |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | LLVM Clang Swift programming language Mojo programming language MLIR |
| Spouse | Tanya Lattner |
| Awards | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Compilers Programming languages |
| Institutions |
|
| Thesis | Macroscopic Data Structure Analysis and Optimization (2005) |
| Doctoral advisor | Vikram Adve |
| Website | nondot |
Christopher Arthur Lattner (born 1978) is an Americansoftware engineer and creator ofLLVM, theClang compiler, theSwift programming language and theMLIR compiler infrastructure.[1]
After his PhD in computer science, Lattner worked atApple for 12 years, eventually leading the Developer Tools team.Between 2017 and 2022, Lattner worked in various positions forTesla,Google[2] andSiFive.[3] He is currently co-founder and CEO of Modular AI, a company building anartificial intelligence developer platform.[4]
Lattner started programming in high school withBasic. He learned machine language programming withPascal andAssembly, followed byC andC++.[5]
Lattner studiedcomputer science at theUniversity of Portland, graduating with aBachelor of Science degree in 2000. While inOregon, he worked as anoperating system developer, enhancingSequent Computer Systems'sDYNIX/ptx.[6][7]
In late 2000, Lattner joined theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a research assistant and M.Sc. student. While working withVikram Adve, he designed and began implementingLLVM, an innovative infrastructure foroptimizing compilers, which was the subject of his 2002Master of Science thesis.[8]In hisPhD thesis, completed in 2005 also with Vikram Adve, Lattner used LLVM for research on optimizingpointer-intensive programs.[9][10]
At Apple, Lattner was primarily responsible for building a new compiler infrastructure based around LLVM and creating the Swift programming language for building apps on Apple platforms.Lattner served as the Senior Director and Architect, Developer Tools Department from January 2013 to January 2017 leading theXcode,Instruments, and compiler teams.[11][6][12][13]
In 2005,Apple Inc. hired Lattner to begin work bringing LLVM to production quality for use in Apple products. Over time, Lattner built out the technology, personally implementing many major new features in LLVM, formed and built a team of LLVM developers at Apple, started theClang project, took responsibility for evolvingObjective-C (contributing to theblocks language feature, and driving the ARC and Objective-C literals features), and nurtured the open source community (leading it through many open source releases). Apple first shipped LLVM-based technology in the 10.5 (and 10.4.8) OpenGL stack as ajust-in-time (JIT) compiler, shipped the llvm-gcc compiler in theintegrated development environment (IDE) Xcode 3.1, Clang 1.0 in Xcode 3.2, Clang 2.0 (with C++ support) in Xcode 4.0, and LLDB, libc++,assemblers, anddisassembler technology in later releases.[14]
Lattner's work involved designing, implementing, and evangelizing theLLVM andClang compilers, productizing and driving thedebuggerLLDB, and overseeing development of the low-leveltoolchain. As of 2016, LLVM technologies are the core of Apple's developer tools and the default toolchain onFreeBSD.[15]
In June 2010, theAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)Special Interest Group onprogramming languages (SIGPLAN) gave Lattner its inauguralACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award "for his design and development of the Low Level Virtual Machine", noting that Professor Adve has stated: "Lattner's talent as a compiler architect, together with his programming skills, technical vision, and leadership ability were crucial to the success of LLVM."[16]
In April 2013, the ACM awarded Lattner itsSoftware System Award,[17] which is presented to anyone "recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both".[11]
Lattner began developing theSwift programming language in 2010, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers.[18]
On 2 June 2014, the WWDC app became the first publicly released app that used Swift.[19]
Swift is anopen source[20][21]programming language withfirst-class functions foriOS andmacOS development, created byApple and introduced at Apple's developer conferenceApple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2014.[22]
Swift is designed to coexist[23] withObjective-C, theobject-oriented programming language formerly preferred by Apple, and to be more resilient against erroneous code. It is built with theLLVM compiler included inXcode 6.[24]
Lattner announced that the project lead role had been transferred to Ted Kremenek, and that Lattner would leave Apple in January 2017.[25]
At Tesla, Lattner served as the Vice President atAutopilot Software from January 30 to June 20, 2017, where he worked on transitioning Autopilot hardware.[26][27]
Lattner served as the Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer,TensorFlow Infrastructure and Technologies at Google from August 2017 to January 2020.[28]
While working at Google, Lattner was the co-founder ofMLIR compiler infrastructure,[1] a compiler that aims to address software fragmentation, improve compilation for heterogeneous hardware, significantly reduce the cost of building domain-specific compilers, and aid in connecting existing compilers together.[29][30]
Lattner joinedSiFive in January 2020 as the President of Platform Engineering,[31][32] leading the RISC-V Product and Engineering organizations (everything excluding HR, finance, sales, and customer support).[33][34]
In 2022, Chris Lattner, alongside his co-founders, established Modular AI, a company that is building anArtificial Intelligence (AI) developer platform. Their first products are theMojo programming language and aninference engine.[4] Mojo is an alternative toNVIDIA'sCUDA language focused on programming for AI applications.Lattner is the current CEO of Modular AI.[35]
Lattner is married to Tanya Lattner, who co-founded theLLVM Foundation with him in 2015 and has been its president andCOO ever since.[36][37]
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