Chris Lattner

2013 Young Alumni Achievement Award

Chris Lattner received his master’s degree and PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Since leaving Illinois, Lattner has been working at Apple, Inc., where he is currently the Director and Architect of the Developer Tools Department, a position he has held since January 2013.

At Apple, Lattner is in charge of driving innovation in the programming tools space, as well as managing Apple’s developer tools products for both OS X and iOS. Developer tools serve a key function that enables all software that Apple ships, as well as powering the iOS and OS X app stores.

Lattner is the founder and chief architect of the open source LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project. The LLVM project is an umbrella project which has grown to include a broad range of compiler, debugger, and runtime library technology. First released as an open source project in October 2003, LLVM is now the primary compiler used in many large and small technology companies. It is now found in products such as iOS and Android mobile devices and Cray supercomputers. In July 2013, Wired magazine featured a lengthy online article that discussed the importance and impact of LLVM on the computing industry.

Lattner’s skills as a programmer have been recognized as the reason why LLVM has the elegant and clean architecture that it is well-known for.

As part of the LLVM project team, Lattner received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award in 2010 and the ACM Software System Award in 2013.