This was last updated in January 2022, and is probably out of date. If you have questions, please contact me.

Chris Lattner

clattner@nondot.org
http://nondot.org/sabre
Ph.D. Computer Science, UIUC

I am an innovator well-known for building multiple large-scale production systems that are used by millions of people, as well as building teams and communities that make them possible. I cofounded the LLVM Compiler infrastructure, the Clang compiler, the Swift programming language, the MLIR compiler infrastructure, the CIRCT project, and have contributed to many other commercial and open source projects at Apple, Tesla, Google, and SiFive.

I lead Modular AI, and serve on the board of directors of the LLVM Foundation.

Resumé Contents:

Work History

Modular AI

SiFive

Google

Tesla

Apple

Graduate School Work

Education

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign - Urbana, Illinois - GPA: 4.0

University of Portland - Portland, Oregon - GPA: 3.9

Notable Writing

Here are some of the more interesting things I've written:

Also some Swift language related docs I (co)authored:

Public talks and other appearances

  1. Video Interview: "Mojo Language discussion on Software Unscripted"
    A nerd-out session with Richard Feldman (a fellow language implementor) talking about various language design topics. Software Unscripted Podcast by Richard Feldman, Aug 30, 2024
    Written summary at The New Stack
  2. Written Profile/Interview: "Can one of the architects of modern software development help unlock AI’s true potential?"
    A few page summary of how I got interested in AI in the first place, as an extension of the developer tools ecosystem. What I saw through that journey and why Modular and MAX are necessary to get AI up to the standards of general software engineering.
    The Angle by Darrell Etherington, Aug 29, 2024
  3. Video Interview: "Harper Carroll AI"
    A 27 minute interview aimed at early-career developers, with advice for how to start their journey as a developer.
    Harper Carroll Interview, July 19, 2024
  4. Video Interview: "Primeagen Interview"
    An hour long interview that is accessible to general tech folk, talking about the social side of launching Swift within Apple, lessons learned that flow into Mojo's design and how Mojo is a significant next step for programming languages.
    ThePrimeTime, July 10, 2024
  5. Video Interview: "Founder Fireside with Chris Lattner | Ep 04 | Accel | Open Source"
    A 30 minute discussion about building open source techonologies and languages, and balancing governance and company building aspects as a founder.
    Accel Open Source Founder Summit, May 1, 2024
  6. Marketing Talk: "Get off proprietary endpoints with Modular"
    A talk for AI Engineers explaining how Modular's MAX AI solutions help get "beyond the endpoint" to control your AI.
    AI Engineer World's Fair 2024, June 27, 2024
  7. Tech Talk: "Unlocking Developer Productivity across CPU and GPU with Mojo" with Mostafa Hagog
    Overview of the MAX platform and how to unifies CPU + GPU programming.
    2024 NVIDIA GTC AI Conference, March 19, 2024
  8. Tech Talk: "Mojo 🔥: A system programming language for heterogenous computing [Video] with Jeff Niu and Abdul Dakkak
    Overview of the internals of the Mojo compiler and compilation model, aimed at compiler engineers an programming language enthusiasts.
    2023 LLVM Developer's Meeting, October 12, 2023
  9. Panel Discussion: "From Inception to Iconic: What it Takes to Succeed in AI" (transcript)
    Discussion about entrepreneurial journey and advice for founders.
    TechCrunch Disrupt, Oct 2, 2023.
  10. Podcast+Transcript: "Doing it the Hard Way: Making the AI engine and language 🔥 of the future" (89 minutes).
    Deep dive into the AI infrastructure part of the Modular Engine, how it works, how we approached it, and why Mojo🔥 had to be built.
    Latent Space Podcast, September 14, 2023.
  11. Podcast: "Expanding AI chip capabilities beyond Nvidia with Modular CEO Chris Lattner | E1808" (63 minutes).
    This Week in Startups, September 13, 2023.
  12. Podcast: "Modular CEO Chris Lattner on Raising $100M to Fix AI Infrastructure for Developers" (34 minutes).
    How Modular started, the origins of Mojo🔥 (and Swift!), why we need $100M to advance AI for the world, and what it means for the future of programming!
    AI Chat Podcast, September 12, 2023.
  13. Podcast: "Mojo: A Supercharged Python for AI with Chris Lattner"
    TWIML: This Week in ML, June 19, 2023.
  14. Long Podcast: "Chris Lattner: Future of Programming and AI". [summary/index]
    A 3.5 hour long overview of what Modular is up to, what the Mojo programming language is and how it works, how AI accelerators and hardware in general is evolving, and more.
    Lex Fridman Podcast #381, June 2, 2023.
  15. Marketing Talk: "May 2023 Product Launch Keynote".
    Modular AI emerges from stealth and unveils our AI engine, cloud solutions, hardware approach, and Mojo, a new language in the Python family.
    May 2, 2023.
  16. Interview Transcript: "Lessons from LLVM" - Discussing LLVM history, how learnings led to MLIR, what is next.
    Supercomputing 2021, December 27, 2021.
  17. Podcast: "World’s Biggest GPU, plus Software-First AI Chip Design with SiFive’s Chris Lattner.
    Discussing the challenges of AI accelerators at the HW/SW boundary, particularly for production deployment of ML algorithms.
    AI with Sally Ward-Foxton, December 9, 2021.
  18. Tech Talk: "CIRCT: Lifting hardware development out of the 20th century [video] with Andrew Lenharth - Discussing application of MLIR for hardware design.
    Keynote at 2021 LLVM Developer's Meeting, November 17, 2021.
  19. Podcast: "A tower of capabilities with John Sundell - Swift Concurrency, ongoing evolution of the language, and importance of design for languages and APIs.
    Swift by Sundell Podcast, July 2, 2021.
  20. Marketing Talk: "Enhancing RISC-V Vector Extensions to Accelerate Performance on ML Workloads"
    Linley Spring Processor Conference 2021, April 23, 2021.
  21. Tech Talk: "The Golden Age of Compilers, in an era of Hardware/Software co-design" [video]
    A discussion about accelerator design, benefits of reducing fragmentation by standardizing non-differentiated parts of large scale HW/SW systems.
    International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2021), April 19, 2021
  22. Panel Discussion: "tinyML inference SW - where do we go from here?"
    tinyML Summit 2021, March 24, 2021
  23. Podcast: "Can Open-Source Semiconductors Upend the Chip Industry?" - High level discussion about RISC-V and SiFive.
    Odd Lots Podcast with Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, February 1, 2021.
  24. Long Podcast: "Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages"
    Topics spanning: programming language design, value semantics, RISC-V, SiFive, MLIR, social commentary, and more. [Summary of Leadership Philosophy]
    Lex Fridman Podcast #131, October 18, 2020
  25. Interview Video: "PLDI Ask Me Anything with Chris Lattner", hosted by Cristian Cadar.
    Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 2020
  26. Interview Video: "Swiftly Speaking 11: Chris Lattner" - backstory and Q&A about Swift origins [transcript]
    Swiftly Speaking, June 18, 2020.
  27. Long Podcast: "Interview: Four Letter Technologies"
    Accidental Tech Podcast, Episode 371, March 25, 2020.
  28. Tech Talk: "MLIR: Multi-Level Intermediate Representation Compiler Infrastructure"
    International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO) 2020, February 26, 2020
  29. Tech Talk: "Thoughts on Tensor Code Generation in MLIR" [slides] - an informal talk
    MLIR Open Design Meeting, January 23, 2020
  30. Marketing Talk: "MLIR Keynote Talk"
    TensorFlow World, October 31, 2019
  31. Long Podcast: "Swift's past, present and future"
    Swift by Sundell Podcast, June 20, 2019
  32. Long Podcast: "Video interview with Lex Fridman"
    Artificial Intelligence Podcast, May 13, 2019 (recorded in March)
  33. Long Lecture Videos: "Practical Deep Learning for Coders" Guest Lectures with Jeremy Howard
    University of San Francisco, Data Institute, April 23/30, 2019
  34. Tech Talk: "MLIR: Multi-Level Intermediate Representation for Compiler Infrastructure" [video]
    European LLVM Developer Meeting '19, April 8, 2019
  35. Marketing Talk: "Swift for TensorFlow: The Next-Generation Machine Learning Framework"
    TensorFlow Developer Summit '19, March 5, 2019
  36. Tech Talk: "MLIR Primer: A Compiler Infrastructure for the End of Moore’s Law", first unveil of the MLIR Compiler Infrastructure.
    Compilers for Machine Learning Workshop, February 17, 2019
  37. Podcast: "Interview: Origins of Swift [transcript highlights]
    Swift Community Podcast, January 16, 2019
  38. Panel Discussion: "The Future of AI Software"
    PyTorch Developer Conference, Oct 10, 2018
  39. Tech Talk: "Swift for TensorFlow: Graph Program Extraction".
    LLVM Developer Meeting, Oct 17, 2018
  40. Marketing Talk: "Swift for TensorFlow", initial unveiling of S4TF.
    TensorFlow Developer Summit '18, March 30, 2018
  41. Podcast: "Concurrency with Chris Lattner", discussing my proposed concurrency model for Swift 6
    Swift Unwrapped Podcast, September 4, 2017
  42. Panel Discussion: "WWDC 2017 Swift Panel"
    Realm WWDC Panel, June 8, 2017.
  43. Podcast: "Interview: My personal backstory"
    SwiftCoders Podcast, Episode 37, January 23, 2017.
  44. Long Podcast: "Interview: Swift history and design" (transcript)
    Accidental Tech Podcast, Episode 205, January 19, 2017.
  45. Tech Talk: "Swift: Opportunities for Language and Compiler Research"
    IBM PL Day 2016, Yorktown Heights, NY, December 2016.
  46. Marketing Talk: "Swift 3 Introduction, Platform State of the Union" - Section starts at 16:30
    2016 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2016.
  47. Marketing Talk: "What's New in Swift 3" - Middle third of the talk
    2016 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2016.
  48. Marketing Talk: "Keynote: Swift & Xcode Playgrounds Demo"
    IBM Interconnect 2016, Las Vegas, NV, February 2016.
  49. Tech Talk: "Swift's High-Level IR: A Case Study of Complementing LLVM IR with Language-Specific Optimization [video] - second half of talk
    2015 LLVM Developer's Meeting, San Jose, CA, November 2015.
  50. Marketing Talk: Swift 2 Introduction, Platform State of the Union - Section starts at 56:40
    2015 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2015.
  51. Marketing Talk: What's new in Swift 2 - First half of talk
    2015 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2015.
  52. Marketing Talk: "Apple Keynote, Swift Launch Demo - Swift Launch, starts at 103:50 my demo starts at 107:15
    2014 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2014.
  53. Tech Talk: "LLVM - The Early Days - first half of a talk [video]
    2013 LLVM Developer's Meeting, San Francisco, CA, November 2013.
  54. Tech Talk: "LLVM and Clang - Advancing Compilers and Tools
    Opening Keynote, 2013 Central and Eastern European Software Engineering Conference in Russia (CEE-SECR 2013), Moscow, Russia, October 2013.
    Selected as the best invited talk by conference attendees.
  55. Marketing Talk: "What's New in Xcode 5
    2013 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2013.
  56. Marketing Talk: "Developer Tools Kickoff" (shared talk)
    2012 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2012.
  57. Tech Talk: "Increasing Industry Impact of Compiler Optimization Research"
    Opening Keynote, 2012 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO'12), San Jose, CA, April 2012.
  58. Tech Talk: "LLVM and Clang: Advancing Compiler Technology
    Keynote, Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'11), Brussels, Belgium, February 2011.
  59. Marketing Talk: "What's New in the LLVM Compiler" (shared talk)
    2010 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2010.
  60. Tech Talk: "State of Clang" (shared talk)
    LLVM Developer Meeting, Cupertino, CA, Oct 2009.
  61. Marketing Talk: "Developer Tools State of the Union" (shared talk)
    2009 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2009.
  62. Tech Talk: "Compiler State of the Union" (shared talk)
    2009 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2009.
  63. Tech Talk: "Introduction to the LLVM Compiler System"
    Plenary Talk, ACAT 2008: Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research, Erice, Sicily, Italy, November 2008.
  64. Marketing Talk: "Compiler State of the Union" (shared talk)
    2008 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2008.
  65. Tech Talk: "LLVM Compiler In Depth" (shared talk)
    2008 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2008.
  66. Tech Talk: "LLVM and Clang: Next Generation Compiler Technology"
    BSDCan 2008, Ottawa, Canada, May 16-17, 2008.
  67. Tech Talk: "The LLVM Compiler System"
    2007 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Portland, OR, July 2007.
  68. Tech Talk: "LLVM 2.0 and Beyond!"
    Google Tech Talk, Mountain View, CA, July 25, 2007.
  69. Marketing Talk: "Taking Advantage of Compiler Advances" (shared talk)
    2007 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), San Francisco, CA, June 2007.
  70. Tech Talk: "LLVM in OpenGL and for Dynamic Languages" (and several others)
    LLVM Developer Meeting, Cupertino, CA, May 2007.
  71. Tech Talk: "The LLVM Compiler System"
    2007 Bossa Conference on Open Source, Mobile Internet and Multimedia, Recife, Brazil, March 2007.
  72. Tech Talk: "Introduction to the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure"
    2006 Itanium Conference and Expo, San Jose, California, April 2006.

Awards and Recognition

Notable awards:

Academic Publications

Since joining industry, I rarely take time to write papers about my work, preferring instead to focus on building new great things. That said, I've had the opportunity to colaborate on the following papers:

  1. "Swift for TensorFlow: A portable, flexible platform for deep learning"
    MLSys 2021, San Jose, California, April 2021
  2. "MLIR: Scaling Compiler Infrastructure for Domain Specific Computation"
    CGO 2021, Virtual, February 2021
  3. "Making Context-sensitive Points-to Analysis with Heap Cloning Practical For The Real World"
    PLDI 2007, San Diego, CA, June 2007
  4. "Automatic Pool Allocation: Improving Performance by Controlling Data Structure Layout in the Heap"
    PLDI 2005, Chicago, IL, June 2005.
    Awarded PLDI 2005 Best Paper Award
  5. "Automatic Pointer Compression for Linked Data Structures"
    ACM SIGPLAN 2005 Workshop on Memory System Performance (MSP'05) Chicago, IL, June 2005.
  6. "Memory Safety Without Runtime Checks or Garbage Collection"
    2005 Transactions in Embedded Computing Systems (TECS'05)
    Journal Publication
  7. "The LLVM Compiler Framework and Infrastructure Tutorial"
    LCPC'04 Workshop on Compiler Research Infrastructures, West Lafayette, Indiana, Sep. 2004.
  8. "LLVM: An Aggressive Compilation Framework for Life-Long Program Analysis and Transformation"
    CGO 2004, San Jose, CA, March 2004.
    Best Student Presenter Award
    Test of Time Award for the most influential paper of CGO 2004 (awarded at CGO 2014).
  9. "LLVA: A Low-level Virtual Instruction Set Architecture"
    MICRO-36 2003, San Diego, CA, December 2003.
  10. "Memory Safety Without Runtime Checks or Garbage Collection"
    Proc. Languages Compilers and Tools for Embedded Systems 2003 (LCTES 03), San Diego, CA, June 2003.
  11. "Architecture For a Next-Generation GCC"
    First Annual GCC Developers' Summit, Ottawa, Canada, May 2003.
  12. "Automatic Pool Allocation for Disjoint Data Structures"
    ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Workshop on Memory System Performance (MSP'02), Berlin, Germany, June 2002.
  13. "Developing a Graphical Robotics Simulator"
    IASTED International Conference, Modeling & Simulation (MS'99)

Other Interests and Activities

In addition to technical activities: