Swift's father officially quits Swift core team: It's just a waste of my time

Recently, swift issued an announcement announcing that its core team is currently considering restructuring the leadership of the project so that more community members can actively participate in the management of the project.

At the same time, the announcement confirmed that "Chris Lattner, the father of Swift and founder of the LLVM project, will be leaving the core team," and stated that Chris Lattner had interrupted his work last year and decided to leave the core team to focus his time on other projects.

Following the announcement, Chris Lattner stated in a post that his reasons for leaving the Swift core team and the Swift Evolution community were not straightforward.

​Chris Lattner left Apple five years ago and has since been VP of Tesla's Autopilot software, head of infrastructure for Google's Tensorflow, and president of engineering at SiFive. He said in the post that he is always busy, but Swift is very important to him, so he is willing to spend a lot of time improving and promoting it. He insists on attending weekly regular meetings, participating in community discussions, and writing and iterating by himself. Lots of code.

That's why the decision to leave Swift was particularly difficult for Chris Lattner.

He said the underlying reason for leaving the core team was the "toxic environment" of the conference itself.

The trigger for his departure was a particular meeting last summer: After being insulted and yelled at through WebEx (not the first time, and not just by a core team member), he decided to take a break.

Last fall, he pushed leadership to discuss the situation with him; but after refraining from dealing with the issue, they made excuses and made it clear they had no plans to do anything about it.

Therefore, he decided to leave.

In addition, Chris Lattner believes that the ideas of himself and some community members have become less and less valued, and even ignored by the core team; and there are certain problems with team transparency.

"I'm just wasting my time. I don't think my feelings are unique here."

Chris Lattner thinks he's out of touch with Swift, and some of the design premises he cares about (like "simple things that compose") don't seem to be in vogue anymore.

And besides Swift, he has a lot of other interests, and there's no shortage of things to spend his time with. He has shown that he is the type of person who is always looking forward, so while this situation makes him sad, he is determined to move forward.

Finally, Chris Lattner stated that “a healthy and inclusive community will continue to benefit the design and evolution of Swift”​.