Chris Lattner is a compiler engineer best known for two pieces of infrastructure that sit underneath much of modern programming. On his own homepage he describes himself as a “systems builder, open-source compiler nerd, and AI infrastructure founder.” He is the original creator of LLVM and remains, by his own account, the individual with the most commits to the project.
LLVM began as Lattner’s graduate research at the University of Illinois. The 2004 paper he co-authored with his advisor Vikram Adve, “LLVM: A Compilation Framework for Lifelong Program Analysis and Transformation,” introduced the design: a low-level, SSA-based code representation with a language-independent type system, meant to support analysis and optimization across compile time, link time, and run time. That research foundation grew into the toolchain now used by Clang, Swift, Rust, and many other languages.
Lattner worked at Apple from 2005 to 2017. He records on his site that he began developing Swift in July 2010, building the core language before a broader team joined the effort, and that he championed Xcode Playgrounds to make programming more interactive and approachable. Swift became open source in December 2015.
After Apple he worked on autonomy software at Tesla, on machine-learning infrastructure including the MLIR compiler project at Google, and at the chip company SiFive. He is co-founder and CEO of Modular AI, where his work continues to focus on compiler and AI infrastructure, including the Mojo language.