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

81 points by flaburgan 4 hours ago

30 comments:

by bobajeff an hour ago

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.

by thimotedupuch a minute ago

Indeed Reactant looks like a young, fantastic piece of technology.

by eigenspace 42 minutes ago

Julia is extremely lispy in its semantics and design, it's mostly separated by syntax.

by melodyogonna 10 minutes ago

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

by brightball 12 minutes ago

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.

by aeonflux 3 hours ago

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...

by mihaelm 3 hours ago

I think the compiler not being open-source hurt with getting people to check it out. Today, people are accustomed to most of it regarding PL development being out in the open, and Mojo was an outlier here.

by rvz an hour ago

> 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...

At this point "developers" these days sound a lot more like consumers than those who actually do research on a tool that solves a problem. Ocaml is barely mentioned in the news and rarely HNers here use that language, but it is Jane Street that maintains and uses it.

Judging by hype isn't a great way of evaluating a language. I am not going to check the entire Nvidia stack, from CUDA, to CUTLASS to cuDNN and even on PyTorch's side just to solve a runtime error that could have originated from either place when Mojo solves all of that.

by aeonflux an hour ago

> At this point "developers" these days sound a lot more like consumers than those who actually do research on a tool that solves a problem.

No need for snarky comments. These days tools/frameworks/languages/libraries/etc are popping all the time. Do you expect people to research every simple signal they catch in the wild?

by jdnier 3 hours ago

You can read a lot more about it here: https://mojolang.org/docs/vision/

by knlb 3 hours ago

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.

by chanux 2 hours ago

This is how I imagined you seeing Qualcomm :D

https://youtu.be/eFbtGDGbdFU?si=VJ0XSiuNO9Z36DtD&t=30

by flaburgan 4 hours ago

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

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

by tecleandor 3 hours ago

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.

by fluidcruft 2 hours ago

Open sourcing was on Mojo's roadmap long before Qualcomm was in the picture.

by tonyhart7 an hour ago

close source language is a dumb concept anyway

by fluidcruft 2 hours ago

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.

by acheong08 3 hours ago

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

by mihaelm 3 hours ago

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.

by woadwarrior01 2 hours ago

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.

by wewewedxfgdf 2 hours ago

Qualcomm is a notoriously closed source company.

Don't reward them with your support just because they are forced to open source something.

by mbanzi 16 minutes ago

Qualcomm is changing a lot. They are learning and adopting open source. I’ve seen this in other Silicon vendors, they used to deal only with big corps and would talk to you only if you promised to buy millions of parts. Now they are all moving to a model where they want an open ecosystem , attract developers, promote open source. It’s changing , it’s not going to be perfect, there will be false steps but the direction is good and we all benefit from this change. As someone else said they are way ahead of NVIDIA in open source adoption so you should keep an eye on Qualcomm

by cromka 2 hours ago

Notoriously is a stretch if almost all of Linux ARM commits these days come from them

by rvz 2 hours ago

They are no better than Nvidia.

I do not see your point.

by mbanzi 14 minutes ago

NVIDIA is way worse and QCOM are improving

by NuclearPM an hour ago

Did you mean “worse”?

by flik 3 hours ago

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.

by eigenspace 43 minutes ago

What sort of projects are you looking at doing?

by Heidaradar 2 hours ago

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

by ChrisArchitect an hour ago

[dupe] Discussion on blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348079

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