Chris Lattner, the inventor of Apple's relatively new programming language called Swift, is leaving Apple, he announced on the Swift mailing list on Tuesday as spotted by MacStories' John Voorhees.
Lattner didn't at first give a reason for his exit, simply saying he would leave later this month "to pursue an opportunity in another space."
However, Tesla later announced via a blog post that Lattner was joining Tesla as its Vice President of Autopilot Software. (He's replacing Jinnah Hosein, SpaceX’s Vice President of Software, who had temporarily stepped into the role at Tesla and will now go back full time to SpaceX.)
Lattner joined Apple in 2005 after leading the creation of another developer tool, known as LLVM, for his Ph.D. LLVM was integrated into Apple's developer tools, and Lattner went on to build much of Swift.
Swift is Apple's language for building Mac and iOS apps. Apple released it at its Worldwide Developers Conference in 2014, and since then it has soared to become one of the most popular programming languages around. In a recent survey on Stack Overflow, a site where developers answer one another's questions, Swift landed as the second-most-loved language, beaten out only slightly by one called Rust (a language led by Mozilla Research).
Ted Kremenek, another power player in the Swift world, will be taking over as the lead developer for Swift at Apple, but Lattner's shoes will be big ones to fill.
As one person said on Hacker News, a site where programmers chat about stuff: "He is leaving Swift in an excellent position and has set up an outstanding structure where Swift is way more than just one person. He spent more than 5 years building Swift inside Apple, so I can definitely understand he is ready for his next challenge."
Other developers are also saluting him on Twitter.
—Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) January 10, 2017
—Greg Heo (@gregheo) January 10, 2017
—Wesley Dyson (@WesleyDyson) January 10, 2017
