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

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.

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...

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.

Qualcomm is a notoriously closed source company.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.