Lex Fridman interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang and Swift, about compilers, Swift for TensorFlow, TPUs and ML accelerators. The talk covers how hardware and software meet to produce efficient code.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN commenters point to it as an interesting conversation with the creator of Swift and LLVM, especially for compilers and ML compilation.
“I watched a couple of Lex Fridman podcasts this week with Chris Lattner (creator of Swift) that I thought were interesting”HN comment, 2021
“I watched a couple of Lex Fridman podcasts this week with Chris Lattner (creator of Swift) that I thought were interesting”
Lex Fridman interview with Swift creator Chris Lattner
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I always wondered why the creator of Rust switched to Swift and just now found my answer by Graydon Hoare himself: link tl;dr it has nothing to do with the relative merits of the two languages --- Edit: I watched a couple of Lex Fridman podcasts this week with Chris Lattner (creator of Swift) that I thought were interesting Chris Lattner: Compilers, LLVM, Swift, TPU, and ML Accelerators | Lex Fridman Podcast #21 this video Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages | Lex Fridman Podcast #131 link
RecommendstonySep 2025
“Chris Lattner also has a very good episode on Lex Fridman”
Earlier Chris Lattner episode on Lex Fridman show
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Chris Lattner also has a very good episode on Lex Fridman (Episode 381, June 2nd, 2023): - link - link - link He has two other episodes on the show: - link (Episode 131, October 18th, 2020) - this video (Episode 21, May 13th, 2019)
Cites itcs702Sep 2019
Lattner interview on compilers, Swift, and ML accelerators.
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How does this relate to all the work that Christ Lattner et al have been doing at Google with Swift, MLIR, etc.?[a] Is this... a separate, parallel, more encompassing proposal? Is there any coordination between these two groups? -- [a] this video
Cites itmynegationSep 2019
“Check for example Chris Lattner’s interview [1] and presentations on MLIR”
Lattner interview on whole-program ML compilation and MLIR
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> Aren't there already many ML libraries for compiled languages out there or are you referring to something else? Something else. If your program is a well-defined set of operations (basically matrix operations for ML), you can optimize the whole specific program instead of calling bunch of individually optimized functions from the library and target a specific hardware (e.g. given GPU). Check for example Chris Lattner’s interview [1] and presentations on MLIR, or proceedings of C4ML workshop [2]. Application in distributed systems: from the top of my head - protobufs, compilation of Erlang and Elixir to BEAM, dask. [1] this video [2] link
