The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source

I would add quick note to this as title is misleading

* It was partially open-sourced before this. There were a lot of cool things they open sourced before like MAX for large scale LLM serving which was outperforming VLLM, Dynamo, etc on a lot of models. (super valuable GPU kernels). This is why Qualcomm acquire them imo.

* Chris (also created swift) talked in the past the reason for not fully open-sourcing was more because he wanted to get all the core design decisions right. He said this was a big thing Swift got wrong as it scaled too quickly being fully open source at the beginning.

Mojo is an awesome language, I've used it a lot as a Swift/Python lover. A couple things though

* If you want to understand Mojo spend 10x the time in MLIR before. It's just a fancy MLIR wrapper (good thing)

* They still haven't lived up to the python "superset" promise and that's the big thing preventing bigger adoption.

* https://www.spheron.network/blog/modular-max-mojo-gpu-cloud-...

I'm glad that it's open source now and they are supporting a lot more hardware. There are some interesting features that I hope the language design community pays attention to.

It's built on top of MLIR so you can make compiler optimizations in a library instead of the compiler. I believe Reactant.jl has been using MLIR for optimizing higher level abstractions in Julia. Imagine a Lisp with that capability.

Does this project have any meaningful traction? Seemed like a cool idea, but I wasn't even sure what problem does it solves. Looks like its completely missing from the regular discussion / news outlets. Every 1-2 years some barely visible post/article reminds me it even exists...

Summarized here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modular-Mojo-Open-Source

This is by Chris Lattner, known for LLVM and Swift.

Maybe I'm a party pooper, but given Qualcomm history, open sourcing just after acquisition feels like they don't care about it and they're going to let it die while they cut Modular in pieces and extract all the juice possible of their cloud offering.

I had been holding off on testing out mojo till it was open sourced, and started picking it up this week.

So far I've been enjoying the language (pythonic, comptime, tile support) and plan to spend time using it to work with gpus to learn more, the puzzles are also pretty cool.

The actual blog post on open-sourcing: https://www.modular.com/blog/mojo-open-source

I remember being really interested a few years ago when it was billed as a superset of Python. I know they pivoted away from that, but I might play with it now that the compiler is also open source.

I think this submission should be merged with this much older one since they link to the same post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348079

This is nice, but the long time it took them to open source I think burnt a lot of the initial traction. I do like the idea & I'll see whether I can make use of it

If you like C++, you're going to like Mojo (if you're looking for alternatives). Some of the semantics and designs are inspired by C++, but wrapped in a Python-like skin. The way to think about Mojo, when compared to Rust, is that it was designed by expert C++ programmers as what they imagine a good C++ will look like. When I see Rust, I see designers who loved the functional programming paradigm and wanted to make a lot of the concept mainstream. This is why some of the semantics can seem awkward if you're coming from a procedural language

I'm pretty excited about mojo and look forward to it continuing into the phase of supporting systems programming. I have been using rust a lot lately for things I had used python for (that were not computation). I really like rust for static typing and functional programming patterns... but not for numerics. Hopefully mojo can become a serious staticly typed alternative to python.

When mojo 1.0 was announced, I looked into porting my current rust project (a very opinionated type-driven DICOM library/anonymizer that has a spec implemented in haskell) and it wasn't ready for that sort of work yet vs continuing with rust. Which is fine! The numerics side looks great. I'm glad they have reached 1.0 and open sourced.

They made a big mistake by not open sourcing before, doubt they'll ever gain traction now.

Really happy to see this. Kudos to Qualcomm for releasing it under a liberal Apache 2.0 license.

Strategically speaking, I think this only makes sense as an anti-NVIDIA play.

If anybody wants to give a talk on this at the 2027 Carolina Code Conference, our call for speakers will be open from January to March. Love featuring languages like this.

Exciting. For hobby projects, I was looking into what should be my programming language. Open source was a criteria. Now I have choice between Rust and Mojo.