Lang Hames is a seasoned software engineer with 17 years of experience specializing in compiler back-end engineering and low-level runtime work, currently based in Sydney and working at Apple on LLVM code generation optimizations. He has a strong academic foundation (BCompSci Hons I and PhD from the University of Sydney) and a track record of impactful open-source contributions to flagship projects like LLVM, Clang, LLDB and Swift’s runtime, including tricky fixes for floating-point pragmas, ORC JIT session verification, and ARM/ARM64 relocation handling. Lang blends systems-level rigor with pragmatic performance engineering—examples include implementing memcpy-based copy optimizations for POD members and enabling Swift debugger expression evaluation despite exclusivity constraints. Rare among engineers, he moves fluidly between compiler internals, object-file relocation semantics, and debugger expression lifecycles, making him particularly effective at diagnosing cross-cutting runtime and toolchain bugs.
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:159 reviews, 2 commits, 53 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Lang primarily worked on fixing and enhancing the ORC (On-Request Compilation) features of the LLVM project. Their contributions involved debugging and fixing issues in the ORC engine related to EDU updates and execution session state verification. They added a session state verifier to identify inconsistencies. The user also made code improvements, such as replacing loop variables with structured bindings to improve readability.
Contributions:32 commits, 13 pushes in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Lang primarily contributed to the RuntimeDyld component, focusing on ARM and ARM64 architectures. Their work involved implementing features such as support for Thumb mode, branch instruction handling, and pointer-to-GOT relocations. The contributions included modifying existing code, adding new functionality, and fixing assertions related to relocation processing within the MachO object file format. This work is critical for the proper execution of compiled Swift code on ARM-based platforms.
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