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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 lik

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

lr1970 2mo ago
> * Chris (also created swift) He also created LLVM compiler
- flakiness 2mo ago
  Also MLIR which is so prevalent in the ML compile stack everywhere. https://mlir.llvm.org/ https://mlir.llvm.org/
- GeekyBear 2mo ago
  Also Clang and OpenCL.
ModernMech 2mo ago
When 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/
- mirekrusin 2mo ago
  Chris literally was saying it from the very beginning (you can watch early interviews, obviously he was being asked about it), everything that happens with progressive opening is what he said he'll do and he gave rationale for it which is summarized by what parent comment says.
  - saghm 2mo ago
    That doesn't seem to address what the parent comment says; they're arguing that the rationale for the progressive opening doesn't make sense, not that it didn't or wouldn't happen. If I say "I'm going to work on feature XYZ at work today because the sky is yellow and grass is purple", it would not make sense to defend my claim tomorrow by pointing out that I did work on feature XYZ.
    - mirekrusin 2mo ago
      [dead]
ubercore 2mo ago
Once they get an async story figured out I will be much more motivated to dive deeper into Mojo
saghm 2mo ago
> 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 ope source at I don't understand what open source has to do with this. People being able to see your source code doesn't somehow prevent you from changing it however you want. Yes, they can voice their opinion on it, but you can also just ignore it. Yes, they might write code that depends on things that could change, but until last week it wasn't even 1.0 anyhow, so it's not like stuff might not break for people even if they didn't do that. Why was the language even being marketed at all pre-1.0 if "scaling" too quickly is a genuine concern? The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that he (or his employer) just didn't really care about prioritizing making it open. That's totally fair, but being disingenuous about is not. It honestly just sounds like they didn't want to admit that they didn't care to prioritize being open source, and I think that has some potentially concerning implications for what to expect in terms of communication around the direction of the language and ecosystem in the future. The fact that it's being developed in the open now is good, but it doesn't seem like the actual decision making is, and that's a red flag.
- LoganDark 2mo ago
  Do you remember how long it took Python 2.7 to die after Python 3 came out? Years. It was horrible.
  - saghm 2mo ago
    I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Are you claiming that if Mojo was open source earlier, everyone would still be using the old versions for a long time? I don't buy the claim that a pre-1.0 language only a few years old without widespread production use is comparable to one of the most widely used languages on the planet that had been around for close to two decades at the time of what you're describing. Even if I did think that was a comparable precedent, that still doesn't address the more direct point I made about marketing the language at all if this was a concern. What does being closed source do to prevent people from running old versions of a compiler to avoid updating their code?
Someone 2mo ago
> He said this was a big thing Swift got wrong as it scaled too quickly being fully open source at the beginning “Too soon”, I could believe, but “at the beginning”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language): “Development of Swift started in July 2010 by Chris Lattner, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers at Apple” and “It was initially a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015”
kibwen 2mo ago
> 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. Then he has learned the completely wrong lesson. Swift spent its first years floundering from breaking change to breaking change (from Swift 1.0 in 2014 to approximately Swift 5.0 in 2019) precisely because it wasn't open-sourced from the outset, instead being developed in the traditional airtight Apple fashion. In contrast, Rust was open-sourced from the outset, years before even its 0.1 release in 2012, which then allowed it to explore its design space in the hands of real users improving their own language without having to spend five years pushing embarrassing major releases to an allegedly-1.0 language to fix problems that any actual user could have identified.
- geodel 2mo ago
  Well I think point was if they had gotten some fundamental things right from beginning they would not have to go through this 4.0 -> 5.0 breakage mess. > Rust was open-sourced from the outset, years before even its 0.1 release in 2012, which then allowed it to explore its design space in the hands of real users improving their own language without having to spend five years One can keep pounding on this but endless discussions about pros/cons Rust Async model, library, framework bifurcation and shortcuts to deal with it does not seem like given an open design win that many in Rust community assume. Going by the way Rust always seems to get inserted in any language related discussion no matter what, IMO it could a meme "What would Rust people do?" when deciding what should not be done.
  - hedgehog 2mo ago
    I think a bigger issue than open source timing is the community governance necessary to shape a tool that serves the needs of a lot of stakeholders. Swift has lived under the shadow of Apple's (often secret) product priorities. The extremely poor backwards compatibility is why I invested in Rust instead, and I think Chris has expressed some misgivings about how the function builder stuff got added unilaterally. It appears what they're trying to do with Mojo is build a more coherent starting design with a closed process but the experience of client work, and then open having skipped over some of the teething issues. We'll see if it works.
ajb 2mo ago
Has the title changed since you wrote this? It doesn't seem misleading to me. Misleading would be if it still wasn't fully open source. "It was partly open before" doesn't seem like it's worth a big warning. But that's just my impression FWIW

lr1970 2mo ago

> * Chris (also created swift) He also created LLVM compiler

flakiness 2mo ago
Also MLIR which is so prevalent in the ML compile stack everywhere. https://mlir.llvm.org/ https://mlir.llvm.org/
GeekyBear 2mo ago
Also Clang and OpenCL.

ModernMech 2mo ago

When 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/

mirekrusin 2mo ago
Chris literally was saying it from the very beginning (you can watch early interviews, obviously he was being asked about it), everything that happens with progressive opening is what he said he'll do and he gave rationale for it which is summarized by what parent comment says.
- saghm 2mo ago
  That doesn't seem to address what the parent comment says; they're arguing that the rationale for the progressive opening doesn't make sense, not that it didn't or wouldn't happen. If I say "I'm going to work on feature XYZ at work today because the sky is yellow and grass is purple", it would not make sense to defend my claim tomorrow by pointing out that I did work on feature XYZ.
  - mirekrusin 2mo ago
    [dead]

ubercore 2mo ago

Once they get an async story figured out I will be much more motivated to dive deeper into Mojo

saghm 2mo ago

> 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 ope source at I don't understand what open source has to do with this. People being able to see your source code doesn't somehow prevent you from changing it however you want. Yes, they can voice their opinion on it, but you can also just ignore it. Yes, they might write code that depends on things that could change, but until last week it wasn't even 1.0 anyhow, so it's not like stuff might not break for people even if they didn't do that. Why was the language even being marketed at all pre-1.0 if "scaling" too quickly is a genuine concern? The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that he (or his employer) just didn't really care about prioritizing making it open. That's totally fair, but being disingenuous about is not. It honestly just sounds like they didn't want to admit that they didn't care to prioritize being open source, and I think that has some potentially concerning implications for what to expect in terms of communication around the direction of the language and ecosystem in the future. The fact that it's being developed in the open now is good, but it doesn't seem like the actual decision making is, and that's a red flag.

LoganDark 2mo ago
Do you remember how long it took Python 2.7 to die after Python 3 came out? Years. It was horrible.
- saghm 2mo ago
  I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Are you claiming that if Mojo was open source earlier, everyone would still be using the old versions for a long time? I don't buy the claim that a pre-1.0 language only a few years old without widespread production use is comparable to one of the most widely used languages on the planet that had been around for close to two decades at the time of what you're describing. Even if I did think that was a comparable precedent, that still doesn't address the more direct point I made about marketing the language at all if this was a concern. What does being closed source do to prevent people from running old versions of a compiler to avoid updating their code?

Someone 2mo ago

> He said this was a big thing Swift got wrong as it scaled too quickly being fully open source at the beginning “Too soon”, I could believe, but “at the beginning”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language): “Development of Swift started in July 2010 by Chris Lattner, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers at Apple” and “It was initially a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015”

kibwen 2mo ago

> 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. Then he has learned the completely wrong lesson. Swift spent its first years floundering from breaking change to breaking change (from Swift 1.0 in 2014 to approximately Swift 5.0 in 2019) precisely because it wasn't open-sourced from the outset, instead being developed in the traditional airtight Apple fashion. In contrast, Rust was open-sourced from the outset, years before even its 0.1 release in 2012, which then allowed it to explore its design space in the hands of real users improving their own language without having to spend five years pushing embarrassing major releases to an allegedly-1.0 language to fix problems that any actual user could have identified.

geodel 2mo ago
Well I think point was if they had gotten some fundamental things right from beginning they would not have to go through this 4.0 -> 5.0 breakage mess. > Rust was open-sourced from the outset, years before even its 0.1 release in 2012, which then allowed it to explore its design space in the hands of real users improving their own language without having to spend five years One can keep pounding on this but endless discussions about pros/cons Rust Async model, library, framework bifurcation and shortcuts to deal with it does not seem like given an open design win that many in Rust community assume. Going by the way Rust always seems to get inserted in any language related discussion no matter what, IMO it could a meme "What would Rust people do?" when deciding what should not be done.
- hedgehog 2mo ago
  I think a bigger issue than open source timing is the community governance necessary to shape a tool that serves the needs of a lot of stakeholders. Swift has lived under the shadow of Apple's (often secret) product priorities. The extremely poor backwards compatibility is why I invested in Rust instead, and I think Chris has expressed some misgivings about how the function builder stuff got added unilaterally. It appears what they're trying to do with Mojo is build a more coherent starting design with a closed process but the experience of client work, and then open having skipped over some of the teething issues. We'll see if it works.

ajb 2mo ago

Has the title changed since you wrote this? It doesn't seem misleading to me. Misleading would be if it still wasn't fully open source. "It was partly open before" doesn't seem like it's worth a big warning. But that's just my impression FWIW