Chris Lattner Lands at Tesla

Tesla:

We would like to welcome Chris Lattner, who will join Tesla as our Vice President of Autopilot Software. Chris’ reputation for engineering excellence is well known. He comes to Tesla after 11 years at Apple where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, the programming language for building apps on Apple platforms and one of the fastest growing languages for doing so on Linux.

This is a “holy shit!” hiring by Tesla. A year or two ago it felt like Apple was gunning for Tesla’s lead in electric cars. Now, it feels like Apple is out of the car game, and Tesla is gunning for Apple’s lead in computing. You can’t overstate what a star Chris Lattner is.

Update: Lattner’s only public comment to date is retweeting this observation by Daniel Jalkut:

I hope folks will not overlook that amid all the drama of @clattner_llvm leaving Apple, @tkremenek remains a huge asset for them.

★ Tuesday, 10 January 2017