Christopher Arthur Lattner (born 1978) is an American software engineer and creator of LLVM, the Clang compiler, the Swift programming language, and the MLIR compiler infrastructure. His work has centered on compiler design and programming languages, with significant impact on both Apple's developer tools and the broader open-source software community. As of 2022, he serves as co-founder and CEO of Modular AI, a company building an artificial intelligence developer platform.
Lattner's career spans academia and industry, including leadership roles at Apple, Tesla, Google, and SiFive. He is recognized with multiple awards from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his contributions to compiler technology.
Education
Lattner began programming in high school with BASIC, later learning machine language programming with Pascal and Assembly, followed by C and C++. He studied computer science at the University of Portland, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 2000. While in Oregon, he worked as an operating system developer, enhancing Sequent Computer Systems's DYNIX/ptx.
In late 2000, Lattner joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a research assistant and M.Sc. student. Working with Vikram Adve, he designed and began implementing LLVM, an innovative infrastructure for optimizing compilers, which was the subject of his 2002 Master of Science thesis. His PhD thesis, completed in 2005 also with Adve, used LLVM for research on optimizing pointer-intensive programs.
Career at Apple
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. He served as Senior Director and Architect, Developer Tools Department from January 2013 to January 2017, leading the Xcode, Instruments, and compiler teams.
LLVM, Clang, and related projects
In 2005, Apple hired Lattner to begin work bringing LLVM to production quality for use in Apple products. Over time, he built out the technology, personally implementing many major new features in LLVM, formed and built a team of LLVM developers at Apple, started the Clang project, took responsibility for evolving Objective-C (contributing to the blocks language feature, and driving the ARC and Objective-C literals features), and nurtured the open source community through many releases. Apple first shipped LLVM-based technology in the 10.5 (and 10.4.8) OpenGL stack as a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, shipped the llvm-gcc compiler in the integrated 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, and disassembler technology in later releases.
Lattner's work involved designing, implementing, and evangelizing the LLVM and Clang compilers, productizing and driving the debugger LLDB, and overseeing development of the low-level toolchain. As of 2016, LLVM technologies are the core of Apple's developer tools and the default toolchain on FreeBSD.
In June 2010, the ACM Special Interest Group on programming languages (SIGPLAN) gave Lattner its inaugural ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award "for his design and development of the Low Level Virtual Machine". In April 2013, the ACM awarded him its Software System Award, recognizing a software system with lasting influence in concepts and commercial acceptance.
Swift
Lattner began developing the Swift programming language in 2010, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers. On 2 June 2014, the WWDC app became the first publicly released app that used Swift. Swift is an open source language with first-class functions for iOS and macOS development, introduced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2014. It is designed to coexist with Objective-C and to be more resilient against erroneous code, built with the LLVM compiler included in Xcode 6. Lattner announced that the project lead role had been transferred to Ted Kremenek, and that he would leave Apple in January 2017.
Later industry roles
Tesla and Google
At Tesla, Lattner served as Vice President at Autopilot Software from January 30 to June 20, 2017, where he worked on transitioning Autopilot hardware. He then served as Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer, TensorFlow Infrastructure and Technologies at Google from August 2017 to January 2020. While at Google, he was co-founder of MLIR compiler infrastructure, a compiler aiming to address software fragmentation, improve compilation for heterogeneous hardware, reduce the cost of building domain-specific compilers, and connect existing compilers together.
SiFive
Lattner joined SiFive in January 2020 as President of Platform Engineering, leading the RISC-V Product and Engineering organizations, excluding HR, finance, sales, and customer support.
Modular AI
In 2022, Lattner and co-founders established Modular AI, a company building an AI developer platform. Their first products are the Mojo programming language and an inference engine. Mojo is an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA language focused on programming for AI applications. Lattner is the current CEO of Modular AI. In June 2026, Modular announced it had agreed to be acquired by semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm.
Personal life
Lattner is married to Tanya Lattner, who co-founded the LLVM Foundation with him in 2015 and has been its president and COO ever since.
References
Source facts from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).