Chris Lattner, Apple’s Director of Developer Tools and the creator of Apple’s programming language Swift, has today announced on the Swift mailing list that he will be leaving Apple this month “to pursue an opportunity in another space” (via MacStories). In 2005, Lattner joined Apple where LLVM was integrated into Apple’s developer tools, while in 2010, he started designing Swift which was introduced to the world by Apple at WWDC in 2014.
Lattner mentions in his message that Ted Kremenek, who is currently the Senior Manager of Languages and Runtimes at Apple, will be taking over as ‘Project Lead’ for the Swift programming language, managing the “administrative and leadership responsibility” for Swift.org. He added that he does not expect his resignation to impact day-to-day operations of the Swift team in any significant way.
This recognizes the incredible effort he has already been putting into the project, and reflects a decision I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space. 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.
Working with many phenomenal teams at Apple to launch Swift has been a unique life experience. Apple is a truly amazing place to be able to assemble the skills, imagination, and discipline to pull something like this off. Swift is in great shape today, and Swift 4 will be a really strong release with Ted as the Project Lead.
Apple has previously announced that it will shift its focus to Swift 4 after Swift 3.1 is released in the next few months.
