Why ML Needs a New Programming Language with Chris Lattner Season 3, Episode 10 | September 3rd, 2025
BLURB
Chris Lattner is the creator of LLVM and led the development of the Swift language at Apple. With Mojo, he’s taking another big swing: How do you make the process of getting the full power out of modern GPUs productive and fun? In this episode, Ron and Chris discuss how to design a language that’s easy to use while still providing the level of control required to write state of the art kernels. A key idea is to ask programmers to fully reckon with the details of the hardware, but making that work manageable and shareable via a form of type-safe metaprogramming. The aim is to support both specialization to the computation in question as well as to the hardware platform. “Somebody has to do this work,” Chris says, “if we ever want to get to an ecosystem where one vendor doesn’t control everything.”
SUMMARY
Chris Lattner is the creator of LLVM and led the development of the Swift language at Apple. With Mojo, he’s taking another big swing: How do you make the process of getting the full power out of modern GPUs productive and fun? In this episode, Ron and Chris discuss how to design a language that’s easy to use while still providing the level of control required to write state of the art kernels. A key idea is to ask programmers to fully reckon with the details of the hardware, but making that work manageable and shareable via a form of type-safe metaprogramming. The aim is to support both specialization to the computation in question as well as to the hardware platform. “Somebody has to do this work,” Chris says, “if we ever want to get to an ecosystem where one vendor doesn’t control everything.”
Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:03
Ron
Welcome to Signals and Threads, in-depth conversations about every layer of the tech stack, from Jane Street. I’m Ron Minsky. It is my great pleasure to have Chris Lattner on the show. Typically on Signals and Threads, we end up talking to engineers who work here at Jane Street, but sometimes we like to grab outside folk, and Chris is an amazing figure to bring on because he’s been so involved in a bunch of really foundational pieces of computing that we all use—LLVM, and Clang, and MLIR, and OpenCL, and Swift, and now Mojo. And this has happened at a bunch of different storied institutions—Apple, and Tesla, and Google, and SiFive, and now Modular. So anyway, it’s a pleasure to have you joining us, Chris.
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