Xun Li
Principal Engineer at Mysten Labs
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolXun Li is a Principal Engineer with 15 years of experience building foundational systems—compilers, runtimes, and blockchain core protocols—from research-grade prototypes to production deployments. Based in Palo Alto, he has led engineering efforts at Meta (notably as a founding lead of the Hermes JavaScript engine and primary contributor of C++ coroutines in Clang/LLVM) and now steers Sui’s engineering as tech lead and top contributor to its Move-based smart contract platform at Mysten Labs. His background spans performance engineering, language/runtime design, and tokenomics, and includes directing blockchain research and industry collaborations at Ant Financial. Xun combines deep academic training (PhD CS, UCSB) with hands-on open-source contributions to high-profile projects like Hermes and Sui, where his work ranges from bug fixes and performance optimizations to tooling and build/test infrastructure. Colleagues rely on him for both low-level systems expertise and pragmatic leadership that moves complex protocols into production.
15 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachalor Software Engineering, Bachalor Software Engineering at Fudan UniversityPhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara
php, objective-c, java, verilog, python, c++, c, sql, c#, scala
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (14)
compiler-optimization10
irr10
move10
javascript10
rust10
blockchain10
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
cmake8
build-system8
testing8
command-line7
cli7
command-line-interface7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
MystenLabs/sui
Dec 2021 - Jan 2023
Sui, a next-generation smart contract platform with high throughput, low latency, and an asset-oriented programming model powered by the Move programming language
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2134 reviews, 993 commits, 1687 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Xun primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the Sui blockchain platform, with commits demonstrating work on Move language dependency management and event handling. They added support for features such as arbitrary spacing in dependency files, events for object deletion, and inclusion of additional paths. Their contributions also extended to adding features to the `sui-move` CLI and testing.
ethereumcontractsmart-contract-platformprogramming-languagesui
facebook/hermes
Jan 2019 - Aug 2020
A JavaScript engine optimized for running React Native.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Xun primarily contributed to the Hermes JavaScript engine by fixing bugs, improving code readability, and adding features. Their work included correcting an issue in IRGen related to object initialization, resolving a bug involving setter/getter properties, and optimizing a performance-critical loop in UTF16Stream. Additionally, they made changes to the build process and test infrastructure, and updated documentation.
javascript-enginereactreact-nativejavascriptoptimized
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