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

60 pointsby flaburgantoday at 7:47 AM23 commentsview on HN

Comments

bobajefftoday at 10:58 AM

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.

aeonfluxtoday at 8:50 AM

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...

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tecleandortoday at 9:15 AM

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.

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flaburgantoday at 7:47 AM

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

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

knlbtoday at 9:11 AM

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.

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fluidcrufttoday at 9:51 AM

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.

acheong08today at 9:11 AM

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

mihaelmtoday at 9:18 AM

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.

Heidaradartoday at 9:33 AM

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

woadwarrior01today at 9:57 AM

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.

wewewedxfgdftoday at 9:54 AM

Qualcomm is a notoriously closed source company.

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

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ChrisArchitecttoday at 10:47 AM

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

fliktoday at 9:14 AM

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.