Chris Lattner rebuilt the compiler stack for 25 years: LLVM, Clang, Swift, MLIR, Mojo
thisdudelikesAI · x · 2026-10-06
A long-form thread traces Chris Lattner's career: starting LLVM as a master's thesis at the University of Illinois in 2000 with Vikram Adve, built on a clean intermediate representation so any language could target any processor. He joined Apple in 2005, created the Clang frontend that became the default compiler for Apple tools (and later Android native code and Chrome), and started Swift as a nights-and-weekends project in 2010; Apple announced it at WWDC 2014 and open-sourced it in 2015. LLVM went on to underpin Rust, Julia, and Kotlin Native, earning the ACM Software System Award in 2012. He then led Tesla Autopilot software briefly in 2017, worked on TensorFlow's compiler infra and TPUs at Google where he created MLIR, joined SiFive for RISC-V in 2020, and co-founded Modular in 2022, releasing Mojo in 2023—a language with Python syntax and systems-level performance aimed at unifying AI software across hardware.
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