Chris Lattner

Last updated

Chris Lattner
Born
Christopher Arthur Lattner

1978 (age 45–46)
Nationality American
Alma mater
Known for LLVM
Clang
Swift programming language
Mojo programming language
SpouseTanya Lattner
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Compilers
Programming languages
Institutions
Thesis Macroscopic Data Structure Analysis and Optimization  (2005)
Doctoral advisor Vikram Adve
Website nondot.org/sabre/ OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Christopher Arthur Lattner (born 1978) is an American computer scientist, former Apple, Google, and Tesla employee [1] and co-founder of LLVM, Clang compiler, MLIR compiler infrastructure [2] and the Swift programming language. He worked as the President of Platform Engineering, SiFive [3] [4] [5] after two years at Google Brain. [6] Prior to that, he briefly served as Vice President of Autopilot Software [7] at Tesla, Inc. and worked at Apple Inc. as Senior Director of the Developer Tools department, leading the Xcode, Instruments, and compiler teams. [8] [9] [10]

Contents

Education

Lattner studied computer science at the University of Portland, graduating in 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. [9] [11] He moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was awarded a Master of Science degree in 2002, followed by a PhD in 2005 for research on optimizing pointer-intensive programs, supervised by Vikram Adve. [12] [13]

Career

SiFive

Lattner joined SiFive in January 2020 and the board changed to ("SiFive 2.0"), Lattner led the RISC-V Product and Engineering organizations (everything excluding HR, finance, sales, and customer support). [14] [15]

Google, Tesla and Apple

Lattner served as the Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer, TensorFlow Infrastructure and Technologies at Google from August 2017 to January 2020. [16] At Tesla, Lattner served as the Vice President at Autopilot Software from January 30 to June 20, 2017, where he worked on transitioning Autopilot hardware. [17]

At Apple, he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, the programming language for building apps on Apple platforms. [18] [19] Lattner served as the Senior Director and Architect, Developer Tools Department from January 2013 to January 2017 where he took over the entire team, took the responsibilities of the Xcode IDE Instruments performance analysis tool, Apple Java releases, and a variety of internal tools. [20]

LLVM

In late 2000, Lattner joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a research assistant and M.Sc. student. While 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. [21]

In 2005, Apple Inc. hired Lattner to begin work bringing LLVM to production quality for use in Apple products. Over time, Lattner 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 (leading it through many open source 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. [22]

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. [23]

In June 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery (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", noting that Professor Adve has stated: "Lattner's talent as a compiler architect, together with his programming skills, technical vision, and leadership ability were crucial to the success of LLVM." [24]

In April 2013, the ACM awarded Lattner its Software System Award, [25] which is presented to anyone "recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". [8]

Swift

Lattner began developing the Swift programming language in 2010, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers. [26]

On 2 June 2014, the WWDC app became the first publicly released app that used Swift. [27]

Swift is an open source [28] [29] programming language with first-class functions for iOS and macOS development, created by Apple and introduced at Apple's developer conference Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2014. [30]

Swift is designed to coexist [31] with Objective-C, the object-oriented programming language formerly preferred by Apple, and to be more resilient against erroneous code. It is built with the LLVM compiler included in Xcode 6. [32]

Lattner announced that the project lead role had been transferred to Ted Kremenek, and that Lattner would leave Apple in January 2017. [33]

MLIR

Lattner is the co-founder of MLIR compiler infrastructure, [2] a compiler that aims to address software fragmentation, improve compilation for heterogeneous hardware, significantly reduce the cost of building domain-specific compilers, and aid in connecting existing compilers together. [34] [35]

Modular

In 2023, Chris Lattner, alongside his co-founders, established Modular AI, a company that is building a next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) developer platform. [36] Lattner is the current CEO of Modular AI.

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. [37] [38]

Related Research Articles

Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xcode</span> IDE including tools for developing software for Apple platforms

Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It was initially released in late 2003; the latest stable release is version 15, released on September 18, 2023, and is available free of charge via the Mac App Store and the Apple Developer website. Registered developers can also download preview releases and prior versions of the suite through the Apple Developer website. Xcode includes command-line tools which enable UNIX-style development via the Terminal app in macOS. They can also be downloaded and installed without the GUI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LLVM</span> Compiler backend for multiple programming languages

LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a frontend for any programming language and a backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes. The name LLVM originally stood for Low Level Virtual Machine, though the project has expanded and the name is no longer officially an initialism.

SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages.

The Apple Developer Tools are a suite of software tools from Apple to aid in making software dynamic titles for the macOS and iOS platforms. The developer tools were formerly included on macOS install media, but are now exclusively distributed over the Internet. As of macOS 10.12, Xcode is available as a free download from the Mac App Store.

Clang is a compiler front end for the C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ programming languages, as well as the OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA, SYCL, and HIP frameworks. It acts as a drop-in replacement for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), supporting most of its compilation flags and unofficial language extensions. It includes a static analyzer, and several code analysis tools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenCL</span> Open standard for programming heterogenous computing systems, such as CPUs or GPUs

OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies programming languages for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LLDB (debugger)</span> Software debugger

The LLDB Debugger (LLDB) is the debugger component of the LLVM project. It is built as a set of reusable components which extensively use existing libraries from LLVM, such as the Clang expression parser and LLVM disassembler. LLDB is free and open-source software under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, a BSD-style permissive software license. Since v9.0.0, it was relicensed to the Apache License 2.0 with LLVM Exceptions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MLIR (software)</span> C++ framework for compiler development

MLIR is a unifying software framework for compiler development. MLIR can make optimal use of a variety of computing platforms such as GPUs, DPUs,TPUs, FPGAs, AI ASICS, and quantum computing systems (QPUs).

Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Due to Apple macOS’s direct lineage from NeXTSTEP, Objective-C was the standard programming language used, supported, and promoted by Apple for developing macOS and iOS applications until the introduction of the Swift programming language in 2014. Thereafter, its usage has been consistently declining among developers and it has often been described as a "dying" language.

Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, Google Brain combined open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources. The team has created tools such as TensorFlow, which allow for neural networks to be used by the public, with multiple internal AI research projects. The team aims to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing. The team was merged into former Google sister company DeepMind to form Google DeepMind in April 2023.

Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. and the open-source community. Swift compiles to machine code, as it is an LLVM-based compiler. Swift was first released in June 2014, and the Swift toolchain has shipped in Xcode since version 6, released in 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metal (API)</span> iOS, macOS, and tvOS graphics rendering API

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Vikram Adve is the Donald B. Gillies professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SiFive</span> Fabless semiconductor company providing RISC-V processors

SiFive, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company and provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon chips based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). SiFive's products include cores, SoCs, IPs, and development boards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ROCm</span> Parallel computing platform: GPGPU libraries and application programming interface

ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains: general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP, OpenMP/Message Passing Interface (MPI), OpenCL.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swift Playgrounds</span> Development environment for Swift

Swift Playgrounds is an educational tool and development environment for the Swift programming language developed by Apple Inc., initially announced at the WWDC 2016 conference. It was introduced as an iPad application alongside iOS 10, with a macOS version introduced in February 2020. It is available for free via Apple's App Store for iPadOS and Mac App Store for macOS.

Mojo is a proprietary programming language under development.

References

  1. ↑ "Former Google and Tesla Engineer Chris Lattner to Lead SiFive Platform Engineering Team". Bloomberg. January 27, 2020. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  2. 1 2 Lattner, Chris; Amini, Mehdi; Bondhugula, Uday; Cohen, Albert; Davis, Andy; Pienaar, Jacques; Riddle, River; Shpeisman, Tatiana; Vasilache, Nicolas; Zinenko, Oleksandr (2021), "MLIR: Scaling Compiler Infrastructure for Domain Specific Computation", 2021 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO), IEEE, pp. 2–14, doi:10.1109/CGO51591.2021.9370308, ISBN   978-1-7281-8613-9, S2CID   232127418
  3. ↑ Lattner, Chris. "With SiFive, We Can Change the World". SiFive Blog. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  4. ↑ "Former Google and Tesla Engineer Chris Lattner to Lead SiFive Platform Engineering Team". businesswire.com. January 27, 2020. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
  5. ↑ "Odd Lots: Can Open-Source Semiconductors Upend the Chip Industry? on Apple Podcasts". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  6. ↑ Etherington, Darrell (August 15, 2017). "Swift creator Chris Lattner joins Google Brain after Tesla Autopilot stint". techcrunch.com. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  7. ↑ Novet, Jordan (June 20, 2017). "Tesla hires prominent A.I. researcher as Autopilot chief Lattner leaves". Cnbc.com. Retrieved June 27, 2017.
  8. 1 2 "Award Winners Made Breakthroughs in Network Efficiency, Data Mining, Education, Game Theory, Programming, and Community Problem-Solving". ACM. April 9, 2013. Archived from the original on May 1, 2013. Retrieved April 27, 2013.
  9. 1 2 Lattner, Chris. "Resume" . Retrieved April 27, 2013.
  10. ↑ nondot.org/sabre/ OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  11. ↑ "Swift's Chris Lattner on the Possibility of Machine Learning-Enabled Compilers". The New Stack. August 9, 2020. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
  12. ↑ Lattner, Christopher Arthur (2005). Macroscopic Data Structure Analysis and Optimization. llvm.org (PhD thesis). University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. hdl:2142/10994. OCLC   64581935. ProQuest   304984703.
  13. ↑ Chris Lattner at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  14. ↑ "Former Google and Tesla Engineer Chris Lattner to Lead SiFive Platform". SiFive. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  15. ↑ Chan, Rosalie. "Chris Lattner, the creator of Apple's Swift, thinks that the smash-hit programming language is going to be a major force in AI development". Business Insider. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  16. ↑ "Former Apple and Tesla engineer will try to simplify Google's AI efforts". Android Authority. August 15, 2017. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  17. ↑ "Chris Lattner's Resumé". www.nondot.org. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
  18. ↑ "Tesla's Autopilot Leader Is Out". jalopnik.com. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  19. ↑ "Welcome Chris Lattner". tesla.com. January 10, 2017. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  20. ↑ "Chris Lattner left Swift core team | Hacker News". news.ycombinator.com. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  21. ↑ "LLVM: An Infrastructure for Multi-Stage Optimization". llvm.org. Retrieved October 3, 2022.
  22. ↑ Murenin, Constantine A. (May 2008). "Conference Reports, BSDCan: The BSD Conference, BSD licensed C++ compiler" (PDF). ;login: . USENIX (published August 2008). 33 (4): 114. ISSN   1044-6397.
  23. ↑ Davis, Brooks (November 5, 2012). "Heads Up: Clang now the default on x86" (Mailing list). Retrieved May 12, 2019.
  24. ↑ "ACM Group Honors Software Developer of Versatile Compilers Used in Advanced Mobile Devices". Press Release. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGPLAN. June 7, 2010. Archived from the original on August 22, 2010. Retrieved June 15, 2010.
  25. ↑ ACM (2013). Software System Award. Retrieved from "ACM Awards". Archived from the original on April 2, 2012. Retrieved October 25, 2011..
  26. ↑ "initial swift test apple/swift@18844bc: GitHub". Github.com. July 17, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2017.
  27. ↑ "WWDC 2014 Session 102 - Platforms State of the Union - ASCIIwwdc". ASCIIwwdc.
  28. ↑ "Swift - Apple Developer". Apple Inc.
  29. ↑ Apple Inc. "Swift.org". Swift.org.
  30. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (June 2, 2014). "Apple Launches Swift, A New Programming Language For Writing iOS And OS X Apps". techcrunch.com. Retrieved June 18, 2016.
  31. ↑ "Using Swift with Cocoa and Objective-C (Swift 2.2): Swift and Objective-C in the Same Project". developer.apple.com. Retrieved June 18, 2016.
  32. ↑ "New Features in Xcode 6". developer.apple.com. Retrieved June 18, 2016.
  33. ↑ Lattner, Chris (January 10, 2017). "[swift-evolution] Update on the Swift Project Lead". swift-evolution (Mailing list).
  34. ↑ Lattner, Chris; Pienaar, Jacques4 (2019). "MLIR Primer: A Compiler Infrastructure for the End of Moore's Law" . Retrieved September 30, 2022.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  35. ↑ Lattner, Chris; Amini, Mehdi; Bondhugula, Uday; Cohen, Albert; Davis, Andy; Pienaar, Jacques; Riddle, River; Shpeisman, Tatiana; Vasilache, Nicolas; Zinenko, Oleksandr (February 29, 2020). "MLIR: A Compiler Infrastructure for the End of Moore's Law". arXiv: 2002.11054 [cs.PL].
  36. ↑ Claburn, Thomas. "Modular reveals Mojo, Python superset with C-level speed". www.theregister.com. Retrieved June 20, 2023.
  37. ↑ Bort, Julie; Sandler, Rachel (June 21, 2018). "The most powerful female engineers of 2018 - Business Insider". Business Insider . Archived from the original on July 1, 2020. Retrieved July 1, 2020.
  38. ↑ Lattner, Tanya; Lattner, Chris (May 29, 2015). "Amended and Restated Articles of Incorporation or LLVM Foundation" (PDF). Retrieved January 22, 2017.
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