Chris Lattner

From fall 1996 to spring 2000 Lattner studied computer science at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon, earning a B.S.; in fall 2000 he entered the computer science department of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, earning an M.S. in 2002 and a Ph.D. in 2005, working as a research assistant and interning at MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry Research in summer 2004.⁠[1]

In December 2002 he completed his master’s thesis, “LLVM: An Infrastructure for Multi-Stage Optimization,” which opens by noting that modern programming languages and software engineering principles are causing increasing problems for compiler systems.⁠[2]

LLVM was first released as open-source software in October 2003; Lattner is the founder and chief architect of this open-source compiler infrastructure project.⁠[3]

The LLVM 1.0 release notes describe it as the first public release of the LLVM compiler infrastructure.⁠[4]

In March 2004 Lattner and Vikram Adve presented “LLVM: A Compilation Framework for Lifelong Program Analysis & Transformation” at CGO’04, the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, in Palo Alto, California, describing a compiler framework able to analyze and transform programs at compile time, link time, run time and between runs.⁠[5]

In May 2005 he submitted his doctoral thesis, “Macroscopic Data Structure Analysis and Optimization,” to the University of Illinois computer science department, addressing how to obtain high performance for pointer-intensive programs on modern architectures.⁠[6]

On July 11, 2007, Lattner, by then at Apple, announced on an LLVM mailing list that the team had received approval to open source “clang,” a new C front end for LLVM; he wrote that the work aimed to be a fully functional C/C++/Objective-C front end but was “still very early work.”⁠[7]

ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry SIGPLAN gave its 2010 Programming Languages Software Award to Lattner as the author of LLVM; the citation called LLVM an integral part of Apple’s software stack in Mac OS X and said it “has had an incredible impact on both industry and academia.”⁠[8]

Lattner recalled that Swift started in 2010, initially as a nights-and-weekends project he was coding on.⁠[9]

In April 2013 ACM announced its 2012 awards, giving the Software System Award to Vikram Adve, Evan Cheng and Lattner for their contribution to the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project.⁠[10]

The same year the University of Illinois computer science department gave him its 2013 Young Alumni Achievement Award; he was then Director and Architect of Apple’s Developer Tools Department, a role held since January 2013, overseeing developer tools for OS X and iOS.⁠[3]

On June 2, 2014, Apple introduced Swift, a new programming language for iOS and OS X, alongside the iOS 8 SDK, with a beta immediately available to Developer Program members.⁠[11]

Swift debuted at WWDC and was seen as poised to replace Objective-C as the main language on Apple’s platforms, with Swift and Objective-C code able to live side by side in the same app.⁠[12]

On December 3, 2015, Apple announced that Swift was open source under the Apache 2.0 license with a runtime library exception, with source supporting Apple platforms and Linux, and launched the Swift.org community site.⁠[13]

On January 10, 2017, Lattner announced on the swift-evolution mailing list that he would leave Apple later that month, with Ted Kremenek taking over as Swift project lead while he remained on the Swift Core Team.⁠[14]

He then became one of several former Apple employees joining Tesla.⁠[15]

After about six months, he stepped down as head of Tesla’s Autopilot software in June 2017, saying Tesla was not a good fit for him.⁠[16]

He later said: “In the end, Elon and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did.”⁠[17]

On August 14, 2017, Lattner announced on Twitter that he would join Google BrainGoogle BrainGoogle Brain was Google’s AI research team, co-founded by Jeff Dean and others in 2011. It open-sourced the TensorFlow machine learning system in 2015 and was merged with DeepMind into Google DeepMind in April 2023.Open the full entry the following week, aiming to make AI more accessible to everyone.⁠[18]

On May 13, 2019, as a senior director at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, he appeared on episode 21 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, titled “Compilers, LLVM, Swift, TPU, and ML Accelerators,” which describes his work on CPU, GPU and TPU accelerators for TensorFlow and Swift for TensorFlow.⁠[19]

On January 27, 2020, RISC-V chip company SiFive announced that Lattner had joined as SVP to lead its Platform Engineering team, noting his 15 years of leadership in software engineering and machine learning infrastructure.⁠[20]

In a post on SiFive’s blog he called it “the company I believe is best positioned to transform the silicon industry.”⁠[21]

On February 25, 2020, Lattner, Mehdi Amini and co-authors posted “MLIR: A Compiler Infrastructure for the End of Moore’s Law” on arXiv, presenting MLIR as a novel approach to building reusable and extensible compiler infrastructure.⁠[22]

In August 2020 he said existing compilers, LLVM included, “were never designed for machine learning integration,” adding: “I would not write a boot loader using machine learning.”⁠[23]

On October 19, 2020, he appeared on episode 131, “The Future of Computing and Programming Languages,” discussing working with Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry, Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry and Jeff Dean, Python versus Swift, LLVM, MLIR, SiFive chip design, Moore’s law and GPT-3.⁠[24]

Lattner co-founded the AI infrastructure company Modular with Tim Davis, whom he met at Google; based in Silicon Valley, the company’s mission is to make AI’s compute layer unified, efficient and accessible to all.⁠[25]

On April 26, 2022, the two published Modular’s first public post, setting out the aim “to enable AI to be used by anyone, anywhere.”⁠[26]

In early May 2023, Modular unveiled the Mojo programming language at a product launch, saying it was designed to become a superset of Python over time; in the company’s demonstration a Mandelbrot set computation ran about 35,000 times faster than in Python 3.10.9.⁠[27]

Mojo aims to combine the usability of Python with the speed of C and was unfinished at launch.⁠[28]

On June 2, 2023, he appeared on episode 381, “Future of Programming and AI,” discussing the Mojo language, Mojo versus CPython, Guido van RossumGuido van RossumGuido van Rossum is a programmer who grew up in the Netherlands and the creator of the Python programming language, which he began writing in 1989 and led for decades as its “BDFL” (Benevolent Dictator For Life) until stepping down in 2018; he worked at CWI, CNRI, Google, Dropbox and Microsoft.Open the full entry, Swift, Julia, building a company, ChatGPT and the dangers of AI.⁠[29]

On August 24, 2023, Modular announced a $100 million round led by General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry with GV, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, Greylock and Factory, bringing total funding to $130 million; Mojo was then still in private preview.⁠[30]

In April 2025 Modular’s platform was described as a full-stack replacement for CUDA, its MAX inference engine (launched in 2023) having added Nvidia GPU support; Lattner said the team “got to competitive performance on H100 in two months, not two years.”⁠[31]

On June 24, 2026, Qualcomm announced an all-stock deal to acquire Modular for about $3.9 billion, expected to close in the second half of 2026; Lattner said it would give the company “the scale and platform reach to accelerate that mission.”⁠[32]

On July 29, 2026, Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Modular; Lattner became Qualcomm’s Executive Vice President of Advanced AI Software and Platforms, and Mojo, MAX and Modular Cloud continue as products and brands.⁠[33]

Writing on Modular’s blog, Lattner said: “Joining Qualcomm gives us the scale to bring Modular’s software innovations to a broader portfolio.”⁠[34]

As of October 2026 Lattner serves as a director of the LLVM Foundation, which describes him as a co-founder of LLVM, Clang, Swift, MLIR and CIRCT.⁠[35]

He has written that he is married to Tanya and has two children; he enjoys woodworking, downhill skiing, snowboarding, swimming and hiking, and was a competitive fencer and president of the University of Illinois Classical Fencing club.⁠[36]

Personal website: Public link: https://nondot.org/sabre/ (opens in a new window)⁠[37]

X: Public account: https://x.com/clattner_llvm (opens in a new window)⁠[37]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-lattner-5664498a/ (opens in a new window)⁠[37]

Modular: Official website: https://www.modular.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[25]

Qualcomm: Official website: https://www.qualcomm.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[33]

LLVM Foundation: Official website: https://foundation.llvm.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[35]