“Chris Lattner designed and built most of LLVM as a graduate student. In 2005, he joined Apple where LLVM was integrated into Apple’s developer tools,” John Voorhees reports for MacStories. “Beginning in 2010, Lattner designed and built much of Swift, which was introduced to the world by Apple at WWDC in 2014.”
Chris Lattner’s announcement via the Swift mailing list:
Since Apple launched Swift at WWDC 2014, the Swift team has worked closely with our developer community. When we made Swift open source and launched Swift.org we put a lot of effort into defining a strong community structure. This structure has enabled Apple and the amazingly vibrant Swift community to work together to evolve Swift into a powerful, mature language powering software used by hundreds of millions of people.
I’m happy to announce that Ted Kremenek will be taking over for me as “Project Lead” for the Swift project, managing the administrative and leadership responsibility for Swift.org. This recognizes the incredible effort he has already been putting into the project, and reflects a decision I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space. This decision wasn’t made lightly, and I want you all to know that I’m still completely committed to Swift. I plan to remain an active member of the Swift Core Team, as well as a contributor to the swift-evolution mailing list.
Working with many phenomenal teams at Apple to launch Swift has been a unique life experience. Apple is a truly amazing place to be able to assemble the skills, imagination, and discipline to pull something like this off. Swift is in great shape today, and Swift 4 will be a really strong release with Ted as the Project Lead.
Note that this isn’t a change to the structure – just to who sits in which role – so we don’t expect it to impact day-to-day operations in the Swift Core Team in any significant way. Ted and I wanted to let you know what is happening as a part of our commitment to keeping the structure of Swift.org transparent to our community.
– Chris
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Congrats to Ted Kremenek and good luck in your new opportunity*, Chris!
Hopefully this loss isn’t as big as it seems for Apple.
*Unless it’s in any way helping Apple’s ever-thieving rivals.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s Swift programming language drives enterprise mobile rethink – May 9, 2016
Nearly half of OS X devs want to learn Swift – May 5, 2016
Google mulls adopting Apple’s Swift language for Android – April 8, 2016
Want a developer job? Time to learn Apple’s Swift as demand skyrockets – March 1, 2016
Apple’s open source Swift will open the door for HomeKit – December 16, 2015
Apple has hugely ambitious plans for open-sourced Swift, and hints on what’s coming to iOS – December 15, 2015
After Apple open sources it, IBM puts Swift programming in the cloud – December 4, 2015
Apple officially releases Swift programming language as open source – December 3, 2015
Apple’s open-sourced Swift programming language could change everything – November 25, 2015
Apple’s Swift programming language could soon infiltrate data centers – November 24, 2015
Developers band together to create Mandarin Chinese translation of Apple’s Swift programming language – August 6, 2015
Apple’s Swift breaks into top 20 in dev language survey; bad news for Microsoft’s Visual Basic – July 2, 2015
Apple’s Swift: The future of enterprise app development – June 10, 2015
Chris Lattner is a particularly smart and creative fellow. I’m sorry he’s leaving Apple. However, I look forward to his next project! Thank you for getting Swift started Chris! Let’s hope it opens a new future of superior programming. We need it.
He’s leaving to join Tesla as VP of Autopilot Software
http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/10/chris-lattner-joins-tesla-as-vp-of-autopilot-software
https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-lattner
Gone to Tesla! Their new Vice President of Autopilot Software.
Which says what (if anything) about Apple’s efforts in this area??
Or are there any other retention issues with people still in the prime of their careers? Just asking.
Tesla has rubber on the road, so to speak. They also desperately need to, ahem, swift-ly fix their autonomous driving software after the fatality.
Silly comments. Rubber on the road is funny, but the “need to fix autonomous driving after a fatality” is laughable. No experience necessary to pretend deep knowledge I guess.
The death of a rider in a Tesla car while it was using its autonomous driving software is ‘laughable’. Thank you for your perspective, dear psychopath.
It’s not ‘deep knowledge’ to know that Tesla got a black eye from the incident, that they never want it to happen again AND that snagging Chris Lattner was a great opportunity to make that so. It’s called deductive logic.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for ‘deep knowledge’ about what caused the Tesla fatality, go look it up yourself, lazy.
Weaksauce. I’m not interested in a flame war but it’s obvious my comment about being “laughable” was about what Derek Currie said, not the other fellow who was watching a movie on his portable CD player while on cruise control at 80+ mph when an 18 wheeler decided to T bone the highway.
I own a Tesla (with a second on order) and am more than familiar with with it. I also am familiar with the FUD the company has to deal with related to autopilot stories. So your comment about how Tesla ‘desperately’ needing to fix software is…dare I say, uninformed.
What do they call people who use Android phones but rant about how bad Apple is? Ah yes, trolls.
You are clearly drinking the ‘I see no problem here’ Tesla KoolAid. As such, I won’t bother addressing you any further. I’ve made my point. Enjoy your defensive stance while the world continues to hold this ‘fatal event’ as historic, sorrowful and critical. I don’t give a rat’s what you personally think about it. There’s A LOT more at stake, obvious to the world.
Flexing a sinking ship?
Cook’s ‘steady as she goes’ lack of innovation and focusing on ‘one less thing’ helmsmanship is slowly showing creative and innovative people the door as it desperately sucks in business-mind saviors to try to save his ass.
IPhone 8 will have to be a portable transporter to save his kiester – and Jobs’ company!
Hell and I thought I was the cynic. We need a new word, Hyperbole just doesn’t do you justice.
In addition to Chris Lattner leaving, so is Matt Casebolt leaving from Jony’s design team. Isn’t that entire group only about a dozen people?
https://electrek.co/2017/01/11/tesla-matt-casebolt-apple/