Soon after the news of Lattner leaving Apple became public, Tesla published a post on its blog welcoming him to the team.
We would like to welcome Chris Lattner, who will join Tesla as our Vice President of Autopilot Software. Chris’s reputation for engineering excellence is well known. He comes to Tesla after 11 years at Apple where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, the programming language for building apps on Apple platforms and one of the fastest growing languages for doing so on Linux. Prior to Apple, Chris was lead author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, an open source umbrella project that is widely used in commercial products and academic research today.
Lattner has worked for over 11 years at Apple, and there is no denying the fact that him leaving the company will be a huge blow to it.
Lattner’s departure is of course a major blow to Apple—by all accounts he was a very talented and well-respected engineer—and the Tesla release definitely adds insult to injury. We couldn’t think of another time the company made such an announcement.
