Interview with Chris Lattner: Creating LLVM, Swift, and Mojo - The Story Behind Influential Programming Technologies
By
azhenley
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Summary
This article features an interview with Chris Lattner, creator of influential programming technologies including LLVM, Swift, and contributor to TensorFlow, now working on Mojo. The conversation covers the origin story of LLVM and how Lattner convinced Apple to adopt it for all major development tools, the secret development of Swift at Apple over 1.5 years, and insights into his current work on the Mojo programming language. The discussion emphasizes maintaining a problem-solving mindset and technical innovation in software development.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledChris Lattner created some of the most influential programming languages and compiled technologies of the past 20 years.
He is the creator of LLVM, used by languages like Swift, Rust, and C++, created the Swift programming language, worked on TensorFlow, and now works on the Mojo programming language.
In this conversation, they cover the origin story of LLVM and how Chris managed to convince Apple to move all major Apple dev tools over to support this new technology.
How Chris created Swift at Apple, including how they worked on this new language in secrecy for a year and a half.
Keep a 'let's figure it out' attitude.
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