Chris Lattner
The compiler engineer behind LLVM and Apple's Swift language, now leading the Mojo language at Modular.
Chris Lattner has an unusual track record: he has built foundational programming tools three separate times. As a graduate student he started LLVM, the compiler toolkit that now sits underneath an enormous amount of modern software. At Apple he created Swift, the language used to write iPhone apps. He later worked on AI infrastructure at Google, including its TPU chips, and passed through Tesla and the chip company SiFive.
He co-founded Modular in 2022, where he leads work on the Mojo language and the MAX serving platform. The pitch is that AI software is currently split between comfortable-but-slow Python and fast-but-painful C++, and that a single language could cover both. Modular was acquired by Qualcomm in 2026, which puts that project inside a chip company’s strategy.