Why did Tesla lure away the Swift language creator from Apple

Chris Lattner will leave Apple and go to work at Tesla. Lattner was one of the key figures in the company; he owns the laurels of the creator of the Swift programming language. In Tesla, he will take a different position.

Chris has worked at Apple for about 11 years and has earned a reputation as a rock star. He was one of the developers of the LLVM compiler, and also helped develop Objective C. In addition, he contributed to the creation of IDE Xcode .
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Chris worked on the Swift project for four years: “I created many of the basic structures of this language, very few knew about its existence at that time. In 2011, others began to join the project. ” Now he has stated that he does not intend to engage in more development of this language

Apple introduced this programming language in 2014, and later, in 2015, made it opensource-project. Using this language, developers can create applications for iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS. Swift is ranked 24th in popularity on GitHub, judging by the number of stars.

"We are pleased to welcome Chris Lattner, who will become Tesla's vice president of autopilot software," the company said.

Tesla leadership believes that it will help speed up the process of creating unmanned vehicles and will do it qualitatively.

Before Lattner, the vice president for autopilot software was empty. These responsibilities were assumed by Jeanna Hossain , who is the main software developer at SpaceX.

For full autonomy, Tesla cars lack functionality, so drivers have to take control at some points. In October 2016, it became known that the company is developing a new system that should solve this problem: “eight cameras providing a 360-degree viewing angle around the car at a distance of up to 250 meters and twelve advanced ultrasonic sensors that allow you to notice hard and soft objects at a distance of almost two times greater than before. " In addition, the developers threatened to equip cars with a radar with an improved data processing function.

In May 2016, in Florida , a driver who was driving a Tesla Model S car driven by an electronic assistant died in a traffic accident. The weather was good - no rain and no clouds. As pointed out in Tesla Motors, the sensors and sensors of the car could not distinguish a white trailer, brightly lit by the sun, against the sky.

Last year, Tesla autopilot repeatedly appeared in the news. The latest news of 2016 is the story of how the software on board was able to predict an emergency collision seconds before it.