Apple employee Chris Lattner, the senior director of Apple’s Developer Tools Department, shared today that he’s leaving the company after more than a decade. He was the leading figure behind Apple’s Swift programming language.
Though he’s departing for “an opportunity in another space,” Lattner says he’ll “remain an active member of the Swift Core Team, as well as a contributor to the swift-evolution mailing list. Ted Kremenek will be taking over for me as ‘Project Lead’ for the Swift project, managing the administrative and leadership responsibility for Swift.org.”
Swift is the brainchild of Chris Lattner, who is the senior director of Apple’s Developer Tools Department. In 2010, he began taking ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU and other languages to create the new language. Swift was first unveiled at Apple’s 2014 Worldwide Developer Conference.
The language is open source under the Apache license, which says that developers can use the software for any purpose and even distribute modified versions of Swift without paying royalties to Apple. It’s hoped that developers will begin to use Swift for development outside of the Apple ecosystem.
