Christopher Arthur Lattner (born 1978) is an American computer scientist and creator of LLVM, the Clang compiler, the Swift programming language and the MLIR compiler infrastructure.[1]
After his PhD in computer science, Lattner worked at Apple for 12 years, eventually leading the Developer Tools team. Between 2017 and 2022, Lattner worked in various positions for Tesla, Google[2] and SiFive.[3] He is currently co-founder and CEO of Modular AI, a company building an artificial intelligence developer platform.[4]
Education
Lattner 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.[5][6]
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.[7] In his PhD thesis, completed in 2005 also with Vikram Adve, Lattner used LLVM for research on optimizing pointer-intensive programs.[8][9]