Chris Lattner
Not on Prends yetModular co-founder and CEO; LLVM and Swift creator
Mojo · GPU programming beyond CUDA · AI hardware portability
About
Chris Lattner is a compiler and programming language engineer who created LLVM, Clang, Swift and MLIR. He co-founded Modular in 2022 to build the Mojo language and the MAX AI platform, and after Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Modular in July 2026 he became Qualcomm's EVP of Advanced AI Software and Platforms. His current focus is a unified, portable software platform for AI across many kinds of hardware.
Known for
- Original author of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Clang compiler
- Created the Swift programming language at Apple, starting in 2010
- Started MLIR at Google in 2018 while building ML infrastructure including TPU support
- Co-founded Modular in 2022 and led the creation of Mojo, a Python-style language for high performance and accelerator code
- Became EVP of Advanced AI Software and Platforms at Qualcomm when its acquisition of Modular closed in July 2026
Key points
- Argues AI inference should run on a modular, hardware portable stack built from the ground up, so code can be retargeted across GPU vendors without costly rewrites
- Argues readability matters more than ease of writing, and that a special programming language for LLMs is not needed
- Says AI tools are changing software craftsmanship and is optimistic about the prospects of junior engineers
Recent appearances
References hosts use to judge fit- Every Engineer Is a Manager Now, with Chris LattnerRefactoring
- That's good Mojo - Creating a Programming Language for an AI world with Chris LattnerHanselminutes
- From Swift to Mojo and high-performance AI Engineering with Chris LattnerThe Pragmatic Engineer
- GPU Programming and Language Design with Chris LattnerSoftware Unscripted
- The Shape of Compute, with Chris Lattner for ModularLatent Space
Researched from public sources, checked 2026-10-08. This person has not claimed the profile yet.