Chris Lattner
Co-founder & CEO, Modular
About
Chris Lattner is an American computer scientist and the co-founder and CEO of Modular, where he is developing Mojo, a high-performance AI programming language. He is the original creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, the Clang compiler, and the Swift programming language. He spent twelve years at Apple leading the Developer Tools team, then held roles at Tesla, Google (where he co-created MLIR), and SiFive. His work on LLVM earned the ACM Software System Award in 2012.
Key Contributions
- Created LLVM, the modular compiler infrastructure that became a foundation for modern language toolchains
- Built Clang, replacing much of the old C/C++ compiler stack with faster, more modular tooling
- Led Swift at Apple, pairing systems-level performance with safer, developer-friendly language design
- Co-created MLIR at Google, giving compilers a shared representation for machine-learning and hardware-specific optimization
- Founded Modular and Mojo to attack the Python-performance gap in AI infrastructure
- His tools are widely admired, though Mojo's promise still faces the hard adoption problem every new systems language faces
