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Comment by gtrubetskoy | Hacker News Reader

There's got to be more to this story. You don't spend years developing a language (Swift) as culmination of previous work (LLVM) and then abandon it for a job in a relatively new and different discipline. It doesn't make much sense to me.

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My guess is that the Tesla Autopilot Software team is working on language/compiler abstractions to reduce their dependency on semiconductor hardware manufacturers, particularly NVIDIA [1]. NVIDIA hardware has been Tesla cars for many years, and they have a dominating position in both embedded and data center hardware for self-driving AI, and they are not afraid to partner with Tesla's competitors [2]. This whole ecosystem is based on CUDA toolchain, which is built atop LLVM [3]. And Chris Lattner is the original developer of LLVM.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-and-nvidia.html [2] https://www.nvidia.com/object/audi-and-nvidia.html [3] http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/nvvm-ir-spec/#axzz4VMqXIKfo

Considering the recent hire of Tesla's new Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering team was Jim Keller[0], the lead architect for AMD's K8 (Athlon 64) and a very influential force behind both Apple's A* chips and AMD's Zen (Ryzen), I think you're right that they're looking to rely less on NVIDIA.

My guess would be that Tesla's ambitions are set on controlling the whole stack. Something along the lines of a custom software toolchain for tailor-built silicon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)

Or perhaps they want to go down the road of FPGA / ASIC. There is some LLVM based FPGA tooling around today [1], but perhaps they want to uplevel the core programming language to a new programming language? Chris has done this already from Obj-C to Swift.

[1] http://llvm.org/devmtg/2014-10/Slides/Baker-CustomHardwareSt...

I think you'll find that it's extremely unusual for modern software developers to remain at the one company doing the one job for a long time.

Given it's largely a field for intellectuals, sticking at the one thing for a long time can become repetitive and boring; losing the challenge and the appeal.

He has a track record of being able to scale engineering organizations in open source and corporate environments.

Exactly. If you can lead and develop a complex, technically challenging open source project that competes head-to-head with, say, one of the top 10 most venerated open source projects, achieve parity with it (some would say surpass it), without too much drama, _at Apple_, then, well, it's probably less about the raw technical talents and more about technical taste, managerial talent, and character.

Mm, I disagree. It's amazing and admirable how hard Chris has pushed on LLVM and such, but if he sees an opportunity to do something he thinks is really important, why wouldn't he take it?

There is, it's called seven figures worth of reasons.

I wonder what his salary is.

Salary will be modest, but the bulk of his comp will be stock and bonuses for sure.

10 mil/yr?

It's not a positive indicator of the health of Apple's engineering and business/engineering management that they couldn't keep someone in an extremely key technology position.

I'm reminded of their loss of both Avie Tevanian and Bertrand Serlet.

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