HackerTube.dev

I Interviewed The Creator Of LLVM, Clang, Swift, and Mojo

The PrimeTime · 274.1K views · 2024-07-12 · 1:05:45

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

ThePrimeagen interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang, Swift and Mojo, with TJ DeVries, in a long live-streamed conversation. They discuss language design and Lattner's experience building Swift.

On Hacker News

Cited in Swift discussions for Lattner's account of Swift becoming complex too fast under pressure from Apple's needs.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2024–2026

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisProgramming language designTech pioneers & interviews
Search by tags
chris lattnerswiftllvmmojolanguage design

What people said

troupo · 2026-03 · Criticism

Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it": [VIDEO] --- start quote --- Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff... We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases. --- end quote ---

Read the original HN comment ↗
troupo · 2026-02 · Criticism

> - Modern Ergonomics What does this even mean? Modern Swift looks like a haphazard mishmash of conflicting features where every problem is solved by "just one more keyword bro". In 2024 it had 217 keywords : [LINK] and that was reduced slightly, to 203, in 2025: [LINK] According to Lattner they never even had the time to design anything due to time pressure from Apple [1]. So Swift ended up with a type system that the compiler can't even check and is impossible to fix. So the compiler routinely just gives up and complains on even the most trivial code. [1] [VIDEO] --- start quote --- Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff... We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases. --- end quote ---

Read the original HN comment ↗
rweichler · 2025-11 · Criticism

Srs question, I keep reading everywhere from experienced people Wayland sucks. I need to start learning of these stacks, should I go with Wayland or should I go with Xorg? If I didn't know any better I would learn the Wayland API. Just like how: if I didn't know any better I would learn Swift (instead of Objective-C). But thankfully I do know better and I know to stay far away from Swift [1]. Is it the same deal with Xorg/Wayland? It seems like noobs prefer Wayland but the experts prefer Xorg. 1. [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by The PrimeTime, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources