Chris Lattner
Creator of mojo and co-founder of modular; since Qualcomm’s acquisition completed on 2026-07-29, EVP of Advanced AI Software and Platforms there. Discovered while ingesting mojo.
Before Mojo he built LLVM, Clang, Swift and MLIR — the compiler infrastructure that much of this corpus quietly runs on. picolisp‘s Pil21 emits LLVM IR; jank uses an LLVM JIT for its REPL and AOT for shipping; nim compiles to C and lets the backend do this work; Swift is the roster’s most conspicuous absence. He is the first person here whose output is infrastructure under several languages rather than one language.
That matters for how his claims about Mojo should be read. When the designer of MLIR says a language can target GPUs, CPUs and ASICs from one source, he is describing a compiler stack he wrote. It also sharpens the vendor question on mojo: the person arguing that Mojo stays neutral across chip vendors now reports inside one of them.
His quoted case for the language, from a 2025 talk: “the world has moved on and CUDA hasn’t.”
Connections
Related
mojo · modular · language-governance · jank · picolisp