Apple invents Clang, funds LLVM and brings it to a global audience and makes its founder of LLVM wealthy for life. He works with the top peers in all compiler fields. Helps modernize ObjC then creates Swift which is sort of like an acid trip experiment language and then bails. He lands at several places including Tesla, SiFive and Google. Now makes his own latest AI start up.
www.modular.com/about.
Clang and LLVM thanks to Apple are the defect compiler architecture for all commercially viable corporations not enamored with GPL v.3 and stuck with Microsoft's Visual Studio infrastructure.
Yet, Apple does nothing, just churning out products with over a billion in use. Still, Apple does nothing according to a small group of whiners growing up in a world that w/o that nothing and heavy investments would not be living the Gig Economy and still leaching off their parents, or both.
Having spent over 3 decades in the world of UNIX and the many tools spawned from System V it amazes me how brain dead the vast majority of self-proclaimed know-it-alls are with respect to how the world of Silicon Valley has modernized the globe and without those crazy kids who became giants of industry most people would have far bleaker options for career paths.
Modular founded in late 2022 has this opening statement on their About Page:
We are world leaders in AI infrastructure. We contributed to so much of it, now we are reinventing it.
What a load of pure propaganda. Gawd, I really despise the arrogance of some people.
Every single executive listed are disgruntled ex engineers who made their entire career paths possible and now they're planting their flag making claims that don't add up. They stand on the shoulders of giants and yet with such a claim of being pioneers haven't created a single bit of Artificial Intelligence because the term, AI, is just a Marketing Term.
It's applied Finite Automata, Massive Data Set, Pattern Matching, State Machine algorithms, nothing more. It's research that had it's humble beginnings more than 150 years ago in Pure and Applied Mathematics and much earlier still in human history, but only recently capable of being capitalized on due to the 50 years of advanced CPU and GPU architecture designs NONE OF THESE PEOPLE KNOW OR WORKED ON.
Again, Apple having nearly 48 years of pioneering work and two eras releases more features for Developers and little snits on this site claim ulterior motives. How small do your lives have to be to armchair visions of knowing what is what in a company none of you will ever be offered to work in?
As much as I used to respect Chris Lattner, I've lost much of that respect of his career the larger his ego has ballooned.
Outside of Apple he's never ‘delivered' as he did at Apple because let's face it, it takes teams of talented people to come together to make even one product (hardware or software) to come into reality. It often takes hundreds of them.
Spotify SEC filings lists 9,132 workers presently for a Streaming Music/Podcast company. I don't even have to wonder how come they've never posted a profit.
Working at NeXT Inc., we once had over 900 people building high end workstations, NeXTSTEP OS, Compiler Tools, Project Builder, Interface Builder, WebObjects, EOF, etc., and after 1992 we were a combined 300 employees globally, yet those 300 people infiltrated Apple and reinvented it and turned a company 3 months from bankruptcy by May 1998 down to 5,000 world wide [down from 10,000] who had 20 plus product lines into 4 product lines, into the juggernaut of today that lists 161,000 regular full-time employees, paid out over $80 billion to third party OEMs via the AppStore and yet gets a thief and frauds.
The lack of perspective by many on this site is an utter embarrassment.
Even Google recognizes Apple is their cash cow platform by the court case presently regarding Search at the federal level.
Apple's Store has directly impacted millions of developers to make a living in small new companies to independent developers.
A simple level of respect seems earned.
