Faculty · F · 03 · Faculty

Ayaan Yusupova

Compiler engineer at Modular · ex-LLVM contributor

Build a language end to end. The boring tooling work — the LSP, the formatter — is what makes it usable.

At Lattice sinceCohort III · MMXXIV

Office hoursMon · 18:00 CET

Based inBerlin · Tashkent (origin)

01 — Expertise

Areas of practice.

A non-exhaustive list of what Ayaan works on, has shipped, or has very strong opinions about.

compilers type systems LLVM MLIR language servers parser combinators bytecode JIT macros

02 — Currently

Working on.

I write compilers for a living. I've contributed patches to LLVM since 2018, and I work full-time on Modular's compiler stack — the one underneath their AI inference platform.

I've taught Compilers & Languages at Lattice since Cohort III. The first time I taught it, I tried to lecture — by week three I had thrown half the slides out and we were just writing parsers together at the table. We've done it that way ever since.

The course builds a small language end-to-end: parser, typechecker, bytecode interpreter, then — in the part most schools skip — a formatter, a small language server, and a debugger. You don't really understand a language until you've had to build the tooling around it.

I'm patient. I'll re-explain anything. I am, however, not patient about people who skip lectures and then ask me to recap them in office hours. The recordings are right there.

03 — Teaches