creators

Chris Lattner — LLVM, Swift, Mojo; now at Qualcomm

Chris Lattner created LLVM, Clang, Swift and Mojo. He co-founded Modular, and since Qualcomm completed its purchase in July 2026 leads its advanced AI software.

Chris Lattner is an American compiler engineer. He wrote the first version of LLVM as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, taking a master's there in 2002 and a PhD in 2005 under Vikram Adve; LLVM is now one of the most widely used open-source compiler frameworks, underneath Clang, Swift, Rust and much else. At Apple from 2005 to 2017 he led the developer tools group and created the Swift programming language, released publicly in 2014. He then spent five months as vice president of Autopilot software at Tesla, moved to Google as a senior director and distinguished engineer on TensorFlow infrastructure, where the MLIR compiler framework began, and from 2020 was president of platform engineering at the RISC-V chip company SiFive. In 2022 he co-founded Modular with Tim Davis to build one software stack across AI hardware, and created Mojo, a Python-family language for writing accelerator code. Qualcomm agreed in June 2026 to buy Modular — an all-stock deal reported at about $3.9 billion — and completed the acquisition on 29 July 2026. Lattner became Qualcomm's executive vice president of advanced AI software and platforms; Mojo, MAX and Modular Cloud continue as products under Qualcomm Technologies.

Specialization

compilers, programming languages, AI infrastructure, developer tools

Country

United States