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The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
- flaburgan 2mo agoSummarized here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modular-Mojo-Open-Source https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modular-Mojo-Open-Source This is by Chris Lattner, known for LLVM and Swift.
- aeonflux 2mo agoDoes 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...
- jdnier 2mo agoYou can read a lot more about it here: https://mojolang.org/docs/vision/ https://mojolang.org/docs/vision/
- mihaelm 2mo agoI 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.
- rvz 2mo 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.
- aeonflux 2mo 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?
- mathisfun123 2mo agoHow noob do you have to be to really feel this way lol Edit: a language is by definition an ecosystem. Learning/using a language that no one else uses is completely pointless.
- ModernMech 2mo agoThe interesting opportunity in 2026 for languages is that an LLM doesn't complain if there's an ecosystem or whether any other LLMs or people are using a language, they'll just write the code in whatever language you tell it to. Already authors are writing languages with features aimed at making it more more attractive for AI to write than people. Also great for working with research languages. I just used AI to write a Halide program and I wouldn't have bothered to do so before, for the reasons you state.
- SJMG 2mo agoJane Street's use of OCamel gives them a comparative advantage in hiring. Many devs put a premium on the tools they use. Same story with Anduril/Mercury using Haskell. You can run a successful prop trading firm/weapons design shop/startup-banking(?) platform without these things. They differentiate you from your competitors by being cool, not by being the best technical solution. If anything they were otherwise unprove at scale and out of pure engineering consideration a gamble. Developers are consumers.
- jkwang 2mo ago[flagged]
- ubercore 2mo agoThe "problem" it might solve for me, personally, is having a systems-level language that matches my personal style a bit better than Rust or other more modern systems level languages. I know they're putting a lot of weight on GPU programming, which is fine and probably solves problems, but this is the part that would motivate me personally.
- ElectronCharge 2mo agoI'm in the same category, but GPU support is definitely interesting too. The idea of offloading intensive processing to the GPU has its merits.
- augment_me 2mo agoI found that a big issue with it in practice is that the numbers are just not great, and the repo is very vibe-coded. When the numbers are great, it's sometimes cheating with the setup. For example some GEMMs only compute each 8th value and reach close to peak TFLOPs because of this, but it's a vibe-coded reward hack and the verifier does not check all numbers of the target. Also, compilers have a lot to prove in 2026. Why not just hill-climb a Triton or Cuda kernel if you need perf?
- MohamedMabrouk 2mo agothe main value proposition of mojo is being a (modern language for heterogenous compute). when writing code for the CPU, it is a nice language. it looks a bit like python, have arguably one of the best SIMD abstraction, a bit easier than Rust .. etc. but in my opinion, that does not justify deep investment in learning the language vs rust or zig. what sets Mojo apart is that it was designed from the grounds up to natively supprt other types of hardware (starting with GPUs). I have been in the mojo community from the beginning and almost every other project presentation starts with (I wanted to do XYZ in my domain and I could match or get close to Rust, C++ perf but then I wanted to see if I can make work on the GPU and it was much easier than expected and now I can solve my problem 10x faster). this is massive advantage that is underutilized outside of the AI/LLM and few other niches. running natively and being portable to NVIDIA/AMD/Apple GPUs means that you can transform any arbitrary workload you have in mind to the GPU and you won't need to worry about the separate CUDA/ROCm/Metal stacks, slightly different programming models, building headaches. you will be using the same language and the same compiler for CPUs and GPUs (all of them). or you won't need to coerce your problem in the shape of Triton to make it portable. If you have a problem in mind and don't like what you see? write your own GPU abstractions, containers, data moving and pipelining logic, work partitioning .. etc. this is extremely powerful and it sets Mojo apart from any other mainstream systems language that I have seen. that's why bigger mojo projects (even pre 1.0) like NuMojo and Marrow are all dabbling with GPU support even before the first stable release. and now with support for TPUs and Trainium chips it is becoming even better. some problems will work better on some architectures and you will be able to split your problem to the best hardware doing some work on the CPU and some work on the accelerator(s) of choice, all with a modern language and one compiler with good tooling. that seems to be a good enough value proposition for me.
- knlb 2mo agoI 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.
- chanux 2mo agoThis is how I imagined you seeing Qualcomm :D https://youtu.be/eFbtGDGbdFU?si=VJ0XSiuNO9Z36DtD&t=30 https://youtu.be/eFbtGDGbdFU?si=VJ0XSiuNO9Z36DtD&t=30
- acheong08 2mo agoThis 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
- ModernMech 2mo agoI'd bet 99% of people who will ever hear about or write in Mojo haven't heard about it for the first time yet.
- flik 2mo agoExciting. 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.
- eigenspace 2mo agoWhat sort of projects are you looking at doing?
- tecleandor 2mo agoMaybe 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.
- fluidcruft 2mo agoOpen sourcing was on Mojo's roadmap long before Qualcomm was in the picture.
- tonyhart7 2mo agoclose source language is a dumb concept anyway
- mastermage 2mo agonearly as bad as closed source compilers. Looking at you ADA (one of the imho nicest designed languages) suffering from an awfull network of closed source compilers.
- mihaelm 2mo agoThe actual blog post on open-sourcing: https://www.modular.com/blog/mojo-open-source 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.
- jeltz 2mo agoI am much more interested in it now that it is not a subset of Python. That felt like something which would hold it back and seems like they agreed.
- Heidaradar 2mo agoThey made a big mistake by not open sourcing before, doubt they'll ever gain traction now.
- ModernMech 2mo agoTheir goal was to get bought. Now it doesn’t matter whether they get traction, they already made a billion dollars.
- fluidcruft 2mo agoI'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.
- wewewedxfgdf 2mo agoQualcomm is a notoriously closed source company. Don't reward them with your support just because they are forced to open source something.
- rvz 2mo agoThey are no better than Nvidia. I do not see your point.
- NuclearPM 2mo agoDid you mean “worse”?
- mbanzi 2mo agoNVIDIA is way worse and QCOM are improving
- rvz 2mo agoI agree. Saying "Qualcomm is a notoriously closed source company." isn't really a point in the semiconductor space. They all are. At least with Mojo that is open sourced and Nvidia's nvcc is still closed.
- cromka 2mo agoNotoriously is a stretch if almost all of Linux ARM commits these days come from them
- mbanzi 2mo agoQualcomm 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
- woadwarrior01 2mo agoReally 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.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago[dupe] Discussion on blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348079
- bobajeff 2mo agoI'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.
- eigenspace 2mo agoJulia is extremely lispy in its semantics and design, it's mostly separated by syntax.
- thimotedupuch 2mo agoIndeed Reactant looks like a young, fantastic piece of technology.
- pjmlp 2mo agoJulia is a Lisp, just like Dylan or Lisp 2. Many Lisps have that capability.
- eigenspace 2mo agoIMO saying julia is literally a lisp is just not worth the type of discussion it generates. I'd much prefer to say the important part: Julia learned a ton of very important lessons from the lisp family of languages, and has integrated a lot of them.
- brightball 2mo agoIf 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.
- melodyogonna 2mo agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348079
- xmorse 2mo agoFinally! I have been waiting for this for years. Mojo has great potential. I would use it for everything if it was for me
- rubymamis 2mo agoI'm waiting for Phase 2[1]: especially "Algebraic data types & pattern matching". Current tagged union[2] use is pretty awkward/verbose and lacks exhaustiveness checking and typed error handling. [1] https://mojolang.org/docs/roadmap/#phase-2 https://mojolang.org/docs/roadmap/#phase-2 [2] https://mojolang.org/docs/std/utils/variant/Variant/ https://mojolang.org/docs/std/utils/variant/Variant/
- jakebol 2mo agoExtensible trait support seems like another big one if the ecosystem is going to significantly grow. Not having clearly defined traits in the language made larger projects composing many libraries in Julia difficult.
- zldar 2mo agoI guess they want to go after CUDA for their GPU lines. Now give us the hardware.
- joshuakelleyds 2mo agoI 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-llm-inference/ https://www.spheron.network/blog/modular-max-mojo-gpu-cloud-...
- lr1970 2mo ago> * Chris (also created swift) He also created LLVM compiler
- ModernMech 2mo agoWhen people talk about a language being open source they primarily mean the compiler. A closed compiler surrounded by a collection of open source things is an anti-pattern and trap to be avoided if you're interested in open tools, that's why open sourcing the Mojo compiler was so important to many people. > 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. This I don't buy so much, as there seem to be a lot of core design decisions still up in the air: https://mojolang.org/docs/roadmap/ https://mojolang.org/docs/roadmap/
- cyansands 2mo agoMojo (owned by Qualcomm ®) is now open source™ try it! Just remember we own it
- vovavili 2mo agoI'd rather have an established company give broad autonomy to PL developers at a loss (Go at Google, Swift at Apple) than risk eventual squeeze when VCs ask for their money back.
- ameliaquining 2mo agoHas that ever happened to a programming language?
- vovavili 2mo agoDarklang is probably the closest thing that comes to mind - https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-inc/ https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-...
- ameliaquining 2mo agoThis was caused by the company running out of money, not by investor pressure, and it resulted in the language becoming more open rather than less. So it doesn't seem like an example at all.
- vovavili 2mo ago>company running out of money, not by investor pressure Potato potato
- ameliaquining 2mo agoThose seem quite different to me? Any kind of endeavor reliant on paid labor needs a source of funding and has to shut down if it can't find any; that's different from a situation where a business could have been sustainable by itself but has already taken investment from VCs for whom that's not good enough.
- melodyogonna 2mo agoIf 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
- ameliaquining 2mo agoCan you explain this in more detail? I'm not really familiar with Mojo but I can't think of obvious ways in which Rust's semantics (as opposed to syntax) are more functional than C++'s.
- snovymgodym 2mo agoRust's type system is very Haskell/ML inspired, specifically the first class support for algebraic types and pattern matching. Modern C++ has come a long way with typed optionals and variants, but it's very tacked-on and lacks the safety guarantees and ergonomics of a language designed with this paradigm at a fundamental level.
- saghm 2mo agoSo what does this actually translate to in terms of Mojo? Rust has algebraic types and pattern matching, C++ has some specific use cases that are "tacked-on", to use your phrasing, so when the parent comment says that Mojo is what a good C++ would look like, they're saying...it doesn't have algebraic types, or that they're tacked on? It's not clear to me why that would be a selling point, so giving the parent commenter the benefit of the doubt, I don't think this sounds like what they were trying to say.
- snovymgodym 2mo agoI don't know about Mojo. I was just answering "...I can't think of obvious ways in which Rust's semantics (as opposed to syntax) are more functional than C++'s"
- adsharma 2mo ago[ mojo explaining why they didn't create an embedded DSL] > This is particularly problematic if you're trying to introduce fundamental new concepts because you can't change the grammar of Python or C++. Yet, this is exactly the approach py2many is taking. Keep it 99% python compatible. Deviate from the python grammar only for new features and where python made a decision incompatible with compiled language backends.
- jbellis 2mo agoIf it's 2x faster than rustc, I'll switch.
- andsoitis 2mo agoVideo stream of the ModCon conference yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvb_G2Dr0mY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvb_G2Dr0mY
- martypitt 2mo agoSlightly OT - but what's the process for training an LLM to author a new language like this proficiently? I ask because I have my own language I maintain, and we're currently prompt-stuffing to get LLM's to author it - but I wonder what type of training set you'd need, and what base image one would use to fine-tune a model, and how effective it'd be?
- flakiness 2mo agoIf we program NPUs on Qualcomm-based chips using Mojo, the PC AI programming as a hobby would be getting much more interesting. I wish they don't limit this to the server chips.
- InsiderCrush 2mo agoWhy Qualcomm Open-Sourced Mojo After Its $3.9B Acquisition https://www.reddit.com/r/LLM/comments/1vsp7vk/why_qualcomm_opensourced_mojo_after_its_39b/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LLM/comments/1vsp7vk/why_qualcomm_o...