
Update on the Swift Project Lead - mkh
https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170109/030063.html
======
sctb
Latest discussion of Chris leaving Apple to join Tesla:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13369510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13369510).

------
fataliss
Good for him. He saw another opportunity he wanted to pursue, went for it,
makes a smooth transition, communicates about it. 10/10

------
emdowling
Good on him. As others have said, well-communicated move. 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. Can't wait to see what it is!

~~~
vcorleone
Tesla

------
tatoalo
He went to Tesla as VP of Autopilot SW. Really interesting!
[https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-
lattner](https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-lattner)

~~~
ricw
This is seemingly quite a different technical skill set to have than his
previous position. I'm curious as to whether Tesla wants to also transition to
swift for automotive code, or whether Chris Lattner was already involved in
apple's car project (project titan).

Either way, a big win for Tesla and quite a loss for Apple.

~~~
SEJeff
Tesla's AP is seemingly built ontop of Nvidia hardware, which is programmed
using CUDA. CUDA is built ontop of LLVM, which Chris Lattner created. Seems
like an obvious fit if you look at it from a purely technology perspective.

~~~
pavanky
That is a bit of leap isn't it ? Improving the compiler has very little to do
with automated driving vehicles.

~~~
myrryr
No way is it a leap. Lots of people are doing stuff to llvm to do gpu work.
Take mapd for instance. There is a LOT of untapped llvm -> gpu goodness to be
had.

~~~
pavanky
Yeah but not for automated driving which requires good algorithms more than
anything else.

------
purple-dragon
Welp... there goes the last of the innovators I admired/followed at Apple.

Edit: perhaps the problem is that you assume I'm just tossing gasoline on the
ever-loved and popular rag-on-Apple fire. I have been an active clang/llvm
user for 6 years, I have written numerous clang plugins over the years, and I
am an active swift developer. Every device I own is made by Apple and has been
since 2004. I am genuinely puzzled why this comment is so unpopular (at least,
considerably more so than goofy unfounded speculations about what Chris will
do next—see above).

~~~
purple-dragon
So... are you down voting my comment because you don't consider it a quality
comment, or do you just not like what I have to say?

~~~
spiralganglion
I suspect people don't see it as a quality comment. Generally short or
insubstantial comments receive a more positive response when the tone is
positive. Negative, insubstantial comments tend to be downvoted.

(I didn't up or down vote, I'm just echoing how it reads to me)

Edit: Had your original comment included that extra backstory/justification,
it surely wouldn't have been hammered with downvotes. Without it, it just
reads like snark.

~~~
purple-dragon
Lesson learned; thanks!

~~~
dnautics
I would have also liked to specifically know which other innovators you
admired at Apple and what they moved on to.

~~~
purple-dragon
Ah, sure. Below are a handful (off the top of my head) that I admire:

Sal Soghoian: automation engineering expert "relieved" of duties for whatever
reasons; consulting now I believe

Tony Fadell: went on to Nest, acquired by Google; not sure what he is doing
now/next

Mike Matas: Omni Group, then co-launched Delicious Monster, then co-launched
Nest with Tony Fadell after leaving Apple; I believe he is a UI designer now
at Facebook.

Scott Forstall: controversial pick I'm sure, but early NeXT engineer, martyr
of skeuomorphism; last seen producing a broadway musical or a play I think

Steve Jobs: 'nuff said.

John Callas: While typing this I just recalled that this famed cryptographer
joined Apple sometime last year. If he is still at Apple, then I was
admittedly off by one in my original statement ;-)

------
mrec
I don't use or follow Swift, but Chris was also instrumental in the
development of LLVM, which has become hugely important in all sorts of areas.
Has he still been active in that while working on Swifty stuff, or have other
people taken over there already?

~~~
Aqua_Geek
I went to the LLVM Developers' Meeting this year, and Chris seems still very
much involved in LLVM (at least from a management perspective -- he serves on
the board of the LLVM Foundation).

------
pcwalton
Chris has been nothing but a pleasure to interact with every time we've met.
Best of luck in his new endeavors. Really excited to see what he'll pursue
next. :)

------
adamnemecek
Let's start speculating what he might do instead. I have a hunch that this
might pursue some Bret Victor-esque product maybe something like Swift
Playgrounds for the iPad but less educational and more dev oriented. But I'm
basing that on relatively nothing.

~~~
sdegutis
If my understanding of the universe is correct, he's going to join a really
high paying start-up gig working on a "revolutionary" new email app that's
basically slightly cooler than what we already have now, and then Apple will
acquire them in 3 years, and he'll get a big payout, and then retire, which
means start his own start up making a revolutionary new iOS app for teaching
kids to code.

~~~
adamnemecek
That doesn't seem to be his style. He's been doing developer tools for a while
now and I can't imagine that he'd be switching. And I think that he has better
options than an email startup. LLVM is one of the most important software
projects ever.

~~~
flamedoge
He's started and incubated it to what most considers as success. What's left
to do is more research and evolution.

------
throwaway7645
Windows support ever coming? I love Linux, but have to use Windows for work
due to strict IT policies. It really frustrates me that almost all the new
exciting tech can't be accessed by me outside of the hobby world. To me, C#
just isn't very productive. Great language, just not for me.

~~~
civility
It gets worse. My software has to run on my customer's computers. These can be
any of RHEL 5, 6, or (rarely) 7. It'll be a few years before I can safely
deliver C++ 11 software, and I snicker at the Pythonistas complaining about
how people don't migrate from 2.7 to 3.x --- I frequently need to support
Python 2.6.

Rust, Swift, C++14, Python 3, etc... are all several years in the future for
me.

~~~
burntsushi
Can you compile a completely static executable and ship that? Or do you need
to compile on distributions as old as RHEL 5?

~~~
civility
It needs to compile (at least the C or C++ parts). Frequently the people who
operate the software will want to make small changes.

~~~
thijsc
I know from experience that it is possible to build Rust binaries that work on
very old Linux versions. You could for example supply them with a Docker image
with a new build stack which can produce binaries they could copy to the old
machines. The same is likely true for Go.

~~~
wyldfire
Unfortunately docker couldn't be used on RHEL5, it requires 3.10 or newer. But
a disk image/qemu could work.

~~~
crzwdjk
You can just give a chroot. At a company I used to work for, our build system
used a chroot with a bunch of rarely-changing binaries/headers that let us
build binaries for old distros, and then the directory with the actual code
you were working on got bind-mounted into that chroot. The build process
didn't depend on anything at all from the host system except for the build
tool itself that set up the chroot environment. Everything to actually do the
build (compiler, headers, utilities) lived in source control and was put into
the build environment from there, so builds were 100% reproducible.

------
mrkd
Thanks to Chris for all his work on Swift.

I can't see this any other way than a big loss for Apple.

------
ddoolin
Thank you Chris for your significant contributions to the Swift project, and
good luck to Ted in the new role!

------
sv3nss0n
Obviously he leaves for Tesla.
[https://twitter.com/TeslaMotors/status/818941362171158528](https://twitter.com/TeslaMotors/status/818941362171158528)

~~~
animex
(Interior) Apple HQ, One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA...

COOK: JUST SAY IT ISN'T TESLA.

A chair suddenly flies across the room.

------
mozumder
I'm wondering if this means that the major work on Swift the language is
complete? I've avoided it since it seems every year the language or the API
changes... has it now settled? I really didn't want to go back rewriting code
every year.

~~~
adamnemecek
> I really didn't want to go back rewriting code every year.

The changes are mostly syntactic and like API changes. And Xcode has an
integrated migration tool that's not too bad. I ported approx. 23KLOC of Swift
([http://audiokit.io](http://audiokit.io)) from 2 to 3 in like 3 hours. And
the changes are generally for the better.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
It can also be utter hell though if you rely on lots of external dependencies
that don't share the same lifecycle.

~~~
adamnemecek
That is definitely true.

------
caycep
It's maybe too much to read into it, but I hope this isn't reflecting on
anything internally on Apple, even though the kremlinology of it can get
overly dramatic. 5 years at any one tech company is a long time, though...

~~~
dottrap
Lattner joined Apple in 2005. That's even longer than 5 years.

------
sdegutis
Very professionally done. Hope all goes well for everyone involved.

Anyone know what this "opportunity in another space" is?

~~~
dorianm
Nothing mentioned in his Wikipedia page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lattner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lattner)

------
avivo
Perhaps slightly off topic, but relevant to the community—Hacker News comments
on stories like this are now being "reported."

As one author mentioned at Business Insider, a site where people write about
business stuff:

> '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."'

[http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-lattner-swift-
creator-l...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-lattner-swift-creator-
leaves-apple-2017-1)

~~~
Dangeranger
It would seem to me that the reporter should have at the very least reached
out to the commenter they were quoting and asked for permission to use them as
a source. If it were me writing the story I would have made very sure the
source was also reputable and confirmable, as that is not always the case in
public forums, regardless of the usually high quality nature of HN commenters.

~~~
avivo
What if you had only an hour or so to research, write, and publish in order to
meet your daily quota?

"If they were writing five posts a day, one former employee recalled, Blodget
[CEO of Business Insider] urged them to write six."
[http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/29/media/business-insider-
staff...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/29/media/business-insider-staff-
exodus/)

These sorts of incentives (and the resulting "reporting" quality) are the
natural result of the web we have created.

~~~
Dangeranger
I agree with your sentiment. My feeling is however that the existing
incentives are the problem, and they result in low quality journalism.

------
shadowfacts
He's joining Tesla as the VP of Autopilot Software:
[https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-
lattner](https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-lattner).

------
iagooar
Swift 4? Wow, they surely are iterating quick... How's the backwards
compatibility in Swift between major versions? If I understood correctly,
Swift 3 was supposed to be the first production-ready release. Or am I wrong?

~~~
eridius
Swift 3's goal was source stability, but Swift 2 and arguably Swift 1 were
production-ready. Swift 4's goal is ABI stability, as well as source
compatibility (via a compiler flag) with Swift 3 code. In any case, Swift is
basically incrementing by one major version per year. Swift 1.0 was September
2014, Swift 2.0 was September 2015, and Swift 3.0 was September 2016.

------
bsaul
Aouch... And there goes my enthusiasm for this language.

I already felt weird knowing Apple didn't use swift internally for their core
product, and seing all the huge bugs and crashes remaining in the swift
compiler, now i'm left wondering who in the company is going to have
sufficient weight to push this language forward.

EDIT : well, on the positive side, he's now free to make the language evolve
without caring about the huge objective-c bridging layer and iOS-specific
troubles...

~~~
xenadu02
A programming language transition takes many years. The toolchain must
stabilize. Once you nail things down you add ABI stability so the OS can ship
with the standard libraries. Only then can you begin rewriting core
components.

It is already publicly known that some components are written in Swift, e.g.:
the macOS Dock is a Swift application.

------
coldcode
I wonder who will take over managing Xcode and the other tools now, which was
his other role.

~~~
audemars
Hopefully, it'll be improved a lot by the next person responsible

~~~
fredsir
Dude's lucky. Won't have to look hard to see where improvement can be made.

------
oldgun
Good for him. I believe he's gonna make tremendous contributions whether or
not he's at Apple.

Now that without all the restrictions from Apple, he might be free to achieve
even more.

~~~
twsted
I don't think he has had that many restrictions at Apple.

BTW I really admire the guy and I followed him closely as I used to do with
others like Dave Hyatt.

People from the open-source world or researchers that have given a solid
contribution to Apple over the years, and not only from the technical point of
view.

------
bkbridge
Hmmm, going from someone with a pretty big Wikipedia page, to someone with
just a linkedin entry. Guess it's fine. But Apple seems to be in a bit of a
tail spin as of late.

Sure they'll do amazing.

~~~
hk__2
Having a Wikipedia means you’re quite known. Not having one doesn’t mean
you’re incompetent.

------
J0-nas
Good for him. I'm excited what his next job is. I sincerely hope it's another
project that sooner or later is accessible for the public.

------
DoodleBuggy
Maybe not too excited about Xcode for iPad?

------
Hydraulix989
Lots of great people leaving Apple right now, not a good sign.

~~~
dochtman
Who else?

~~~
menix
Mark Gurman even mentioned a lot of good people were leaving the company.
([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-
apple...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple-
alienated-mac-loyalists))

------
gmosx
I didn't see that coming, very disappointing news. Definitely a loss for Apple
and Swift. I really hope he will somehow stay involved with the project.

~~~
timjver
Did you read the email at all?

 _This decision wasn 't made lightly, and I want you all to know that I’m
still completely committed to Swift. I plan to remain an active member of the
Swift Core Team, as well as a contributor to the swift-evolution mailing
list._

~~~
Jugurtha
From the guidelines[0]:

> _Please don 't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even
> read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article
> mentions that."_

Not nitpicking, but we can miss things or we can be looking at different
things.

Case in point, one time on a Python mailing list, I asked a question and one
person pasted something from the docs. I had read the docs for what I was
trying to do before asking the question, specifically the paragraph pasted and
I just thought "How could I have missed that?". It turned out they were
pasting the docs from Python 3 and I was reading the docs for Python 2.7. The
paragraph was identical in every respect, _except_ for the particular thing I
was talking about which was changed with Python 3.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
Aradalf
Except that doesn't apply when the "article" is all of 5 sentences.

~~~
Jugurtha
You're not wrong. We don't know that the commenter has read that Lattner wrote
he'll continue to be involved and wondered if he will in fact continue to be
involved once Swift no longer becomes his main activity. Whether we like or
not, it will have a smaller mind share than it did when it was his main
priority and his job revolved around it.

------
geoffmac
this is the worst news ever. worse than all recent negative Apple press

------
realstuff
> Chris Lattner clattner at apple.com

And this is why one should not use @company.com email :)

~~~
kipe
Why is that? Anything he did for Apple is owned by Apple.

~~~
realstuff
Including his contacts and reputation? What if someone wants to email him now?

~~~
johanj
Then he'll make his email or other contact information available in some
manner.

------
dorianm
Ted Kremenek doesn't seem to be a very active contributor of Swift.

[https://github.com/tkremenek](https://github.com/tkremenek)

[https://github.com/apple/swift/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/apple/swift/graphs/contributors)

~~~
bratsche
And yet Chris still thought he was fit to lead the group. Maybe in a project
leadership role it's not all about how many commits you make?

~~~
elldoubleyew
Number of commits != overall impact on the language/community. I think he will
serve this role just fine.

