Chris Lattner was an employee for whom from Jun 2017 to Jun 2018?
Chris Lattner Chris Lattner ( born 1978 ) is an American software engineer best known as the main author of LLVM and related projects such as the Clang compiler and the Swift programming language . He joined SiFive as Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering , after two years at Google Brain . Prior to that , he briefly served as Vice President of Autopilot Software at Tesla , Inc . and worked at Apple Inc . as Senior Director of the Developer Tools department , leading the Xcode , Instruments , and compiler teams . Background . Lattner studied computer science at the University of Portland , Oregon , graduating in 2000 . While in Oregon , he worked as an operating system developer , enhancing Sequent Computer Systemss DYNIX/ptx . He is married to compiler engineer Tanya Lattner , who co-founded and is president and COO of the LLVM Foundation since 2015 . LLVM . In late 2000 , Lattner joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a research assistant and M.Sc . student . While working with Vikram Adve , he designed and began implementing LLVM , an innovative infrastructure for optimizing compilers , which was the subject of his 2002 M.Sc . thesis . He completed his Ph.D . in 2005 , researching new techniques for optimizing pointer-intensive programs and adding them to LLVM . In 2005 , Apple Inc . hired Lattner to begin work bringing LLVM to production quality for use in Apple products . Over time , Lattner built out the technology , personally implementing many major new features in LLVM , formed and built a team of LLVM developers at Apple , started the Clang project , took responsibility for evolving Objective-C ( contributing to the blocks language feature , and driving the ARC and Objective-C literals features ) , and nurtured the open source community ( leading it through many open source releases ) . Apple first shipped LLVM-based technology in the 10.5 ( and 10.4.8 ) OpenGL stack as a just-in-time ( JIT ) compiler , shipped the llvm-gcc compiler in the integrated development environment ( IDE ) Xcode 3.1 , Clang 1.0 in Xcode 3.2 , Clang 2.0 ( with C++ support ) in Xcode 4.0 , and LLDB , libc++ , assemblers , and disassembler technology in later releases . Lattners recent work involves designing , implementing , and evangelizing the LLVM and Clang compilers , productizing and driving the debugger LLDB , and overseeing development of the low-level toolchain . As of 2016 , LLVM technologies are the core of Apples developer tools and the default toolchain on FreeBSD . In June 2010 , the Association for Computing Machinery ( ACM ) Special Interest Group on programming languages ( SIGPLAN ) gave Lattner its inaugural ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for his design and development of the Low Level Virtual Machine , noting that Professor Adve has stated : Lattner’s talent as a compiler architect , together with his programming skills , technical vision , and leadership ability were crucial to the success of LLVM . In April 2013 , the ACM awarded Lattner its Software System Award , which is presented to anyone recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence , reflected in contributions to concepts , in commercial acceptance , or both . Swift . Swift is an open source programming language with first-class functions for iOS and macOS development , created by Apple and introduced at Apples developer conference Apple Worldwide Developers Conference ( WWDC ) 2014 . Swift is designed to coexist with Objective-C , the object-oriented programming language formerly preferred by Apple , and to be more resilient against erroneous code . It is built with the LLVM compiler included in Xcode 6 . Lattner began developing Swift in 2010 , with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers . On June 2 , 2014 , the WWDC app became the first publicly released app that used Swift . Lattner announced that the Project Lead role had been transferred to Ted Kremenek , and that Lattner would leave Apple in January 2017 .