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I always wondered why the creator of Rust switched to Swift and just now found my answer by Graydon Hoare himself:

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7qels2/i_wonder_why_g...

tl;dr it has nothing to do with the relative merits of the two languages

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Edit: I watched a couple of Lex Fridman podcasts this week with Chris Lattner (creator of Swift) that I thought were interesting

Chris Lattner: Compilers, LLVM, Swift, TPU, and ML Accelerators | Lex Fridman Podcast #21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCd3CzGSte8

Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages | Lex Fridman Podcast #131

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWTvXbQHwWs

⬐ pram

“I've always been a language pluralist -- picture my relationship towards languages like a kid enjoying a wide variety of building blocks, musical instruments or plastic dinosaurs -- and I don't think evangelism or single-language puritanism is especially helpful.”

What a great statement!

Really loved listening to his recent podcast with Lex Fridman[1].

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yCd3CzGSte8

⬐ WanderPanda

"Recent" seems relative

⬐ hinkley

When I read that SiFive is working on custom silicon, my first thought was to wonder what would happen if custom hardware and custom programming languages co-evolved together, instead of languages adapting to old hardware that's adapted to older programming languages.

.. and here he is talking about compilers. I might have to keep an eye on SiFive in addition to Oxide.

There are some other people talking about him not staying long at places. In this talk he mentions how he intended to stay at UIUC for one year and got 'nerd-sniped' into staying for 5 years building LLVM. After an experience like that, I could see how someone might feel claustrophobic and tend to take any opportunity on offer - if it's interesting enough.

⬐ chrislattner

Yeah, I don't expect people to understand how transformative SiFive is. Give it a couple years and it will make sense :-)

> Aren't there already many ML libraries for compiled languages out there or are you referring to something else?

Something else. If your program is a well-defined set of operations (basically matrix operations for ML), you can optimize the whole specific program instead of calling bunch of individually optimized functions from the library and target a specific hardware (e.g. given GPU). Check for example Chris Lattner’s interview [1] and presentations on MLIR, or proceedings of C4ML workshop [2].

Application in distributed systems: from the top of my head - protobufs, compilation of Erlang and Elixir to BEAM, dask.

[1] https://youtu.be/yCd3CzGSte8 [2] http://c4ml.org/

How does this relate to all the work that Christ Lattner et al have been doing at Google with Swift, MLIR, etc.?[a]

Is this... a separate, parallel, more encompassing proposal?

Is there any coordination between these two groups?

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[a] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCd3CzGSte8

⬐ adamnemecek

It's the same group.

⬐ samtheprogram

I don't know if "Christ" Lattner was intentional (humorous) or an accident, but I chuckled.

⬐ cs702

Accident.