Why ML Needs a New Programming Language with Chris Lattner

About this episode

Chris Lattner discusses the design of a new programming language, Mojo, aimed at enhancing productivity and control in GPU programming.

Chris Lattner is the creator of LLVM and led the development of the Swift language at Apple. With Mojo, he’s taking another big swing: How do you make the process of getting the full power out of modern GPUs productive and fun? In this episode, Ron and Chris discuss how to design a language that’s easy to use while still providing the level of control required to write state of the art kernels. A key idea is to ask programmers to fully reckon with the details of the hardware, but making that work manageable and shareable via a form of type-safe metaprogramming. The aim is to support both specialization to the computation in question as well as to the hardware platform. “Somebody has to do this work,” Chris says, “if we ever want to get to an ecosystem where one vendor doesn’t control everything.”

People in this episode

Host: Ron

Guest: Chris Lattner

Topics covered

• machine learning
• programming languages
• GPU programming
• metaprogramming
• software development

Keywords

• machine learning
• programming language
• Mojo
• LLVM
• Swift
• GPU
• metaprogramming

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Apple

Products: LLVM, Swift, Mojo

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