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I feel like this language would really benefit from some sort of 1-pager overview.

I just spent a fair bit of time on the official site, and I still don't think I have a very good grasp of what problem this language aims to solve, or why I would select it over other similar languages

Their communication definitely needs work. I listened to the interview with Chris on the Lex Friedman podcast a few years ago. Back when the pitch still was "minimal python superset that allows us to make it go voom". It wasn't a bad pitch. But it's gotten a lot murkier since then apparently. And obviously pitching a new language just before world plus dog was about to switch to delegating programming work to AI agents wasn't great timing.

> "Qualcomm to Acquire Modular"

That's linked from their news section. If I read between the lines here what happened is the VC money ran out and they arranged some kind of acquihire. That obviously raises a lot of questions about what will happen to Mojo and the intentions around it. The merger was completed a few weeks ago so apparently this is a done deal. Them wrapping a ribbon around the 1.0 a few weeks later is a bit suggestive.

The modular front page reads like it was trying to pitch the whole thing as a competitor to other inference platforms like open router, replicate, bedrock, etc.

I'm sure there's more to it and that the tech was amazing. But the acquisition raises a lot of questions about the future of the whole thing. An OSS move at least would allow people to continue working on Mojo independently from Qualcomm. I assume some people in the team might be moving on post acquisition.

I felt the same way, even after browsing around on the website, and somehow I got to https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/quickstart/, which brings you to mojolang.org instead, which is the real website of the language it seems, instead of "Modular" which I guess is the business.

https://mojolang.org is a lot better as a introduction to the language for a programmer, at least for me, compared to whatever I could find on the modular.com website.

Having written a lot of Mojo over the last two year, just for fun, it's a really cool language. Ownership model adjacent to Rust, comptime in the realm of Zig, rich type system, first class SIMD support, etc. Performance wise it's the first language in long time that isn't just an LLVM wrapper. LLVM is still involved, but they are using it differently than say, Rust or Zig.

Very excited for Mojo once it's open sourced later this year.

Whoever behind the company communication have done an incredibly terrible job. They start with an extremely unnecessary polished Steve-Jobs-alike debut video when they have zero stuff to offer, while the founder name is already immensely trustworthy. Then follow with a very ugly AI-image-heavy website and blog posts, only to be reverted back to plain website later.

I'd love the language and platform be succesful, nevertheless.

It's supposed to be (currently) a fully native, Python-like language, but for GPUs primarily. Though I am seeing it as having a future as a fully native Python alternative that might get interesting.

I hope with 1.0 (havent fully read the article yet) they stop breaking language features / syntax because they did quite a few different changes over time, their overall goal is to be a fully native superset of Python.

I do see this one overtaking Nim over time, which kind of saddens me, because I like Nim for what it is, but Mojo trying to be a superset of Python is a no-brainer for most Python developers. Reminds me of how a lot of Go devs were former Python devs not C++.

You'd likely enjoy: https://mojolang.org/nightly/docs/vision/ for why we created it, and there's https://mojolang.org/nightly/docs/faq/ as well :)

Feedback welcome as always and thanks for checking it out! Encourage you to watch ModCon next week for some exciting announcements :)

Do you mean the Modular site or the Mojo site? https://mojolang.org/ makes some clear statements.
To be fair, a good bit of the apps/programs/projects posted on hacker news could use a good '1-pager overview'. Like has nobody every explained the 'elevator pitch'. A little marketing doesn't mean you are selling out. Obfuscating your product doesn't make you hip.
This page really helped me to put it into perspective against Python:

https://www.modular.com/blog/an-easy-introduction-to-mojo-fo...

https://github.com/py2many/static-python-skill

You can stick to python and generate mojo or rust or lean.

There is more than one solution to the two language problem.

I think they wrote an internal memo and by mistake they share with the public. I read because one person I know works there, now I don't know what my friend does there either. Sounds like another VC eating company.
For me as a follower, my interest is all about a compiled and fast language with little complexity (vs Rust), and a highly readable and fluent syntax (vs Go).
i think the main idea is that by using MLIR[1] instead of the usual LLVM path it can target gpus directly

1. https://mlir.llvm.org/

Python, but good.
Don't see the value of using a language with a closed source compiler...

Much better options out there. Python already has libraries like Pydantic that offload performance to functions written in Rust under the hood.

> Finally, we will continue to progressively open-source more of the Mojo language, as well as components in MAX that we have built with it. Our commitment remains unchanged – we will open source the Mojo compiler and toolchain in 2026.
The point is that Mojo compiles to MLIR for programming on heterogenous compute and GPU so something like Pydantic isn't really comparable here.

The alternatives would be stuff like CUDA

The value has already been materialized. They were acquired by Qualcomm for $3.9 billion.
AI generated first image does not give me much confidence.

Lastest OpenCV 5 release notes also had a lot of LLMisms.

I guess that's the new normal. Still, I am very hopeful for Mojo.

Is Mojo being a superset of Python still part of its projected feature set?

I tried Mojo a bit early on and decided to come back to it when it was more complete, and in the interim I read some comments somewhere that the superset-of-Python part was being walked back from.

On https://mojolang.org/docs/roadmap/ it's stated (Phase 3) that "Mojo may or may not evolve into a full superset of Python, and it's okay if it doesn't."

I feel like that "full superset of Python" part was part of the appeal of Mojo.

Personally I'm kind of tired of 97% python-compatible this-and-that. Python itself has enough of a history of incompatibility and the cognitive overhead in switching might be easier with just moving to a totally different language. But maybe not — it depends on the details I guess.

Honestly reading through the documentation more and more I'm more and more confused about what the 1.0 release actually means.

> Finally, we will continue to progressively open-source more of the Mojo language, as well as components in MAX that we have built with it. Our commitment remains unchanged – we will open source the Mojo compiler and toolchain in 2026.

Why not now though? Why wait for 4 more months? What magic is there to hide in just making it source available at least.

From Mojo Wikipedia article: ``` The intention behind Mojo is to bridge the gap between Python’s ease of use and the fast performance required for cutting-edge AI applications. ```

Basically, same raison d'etre as that of Julia.

Nothing but respect for Chris, and I understand why founders take these deals. But an acquihire usually means the product is the part that gets left behind, and that's the part I cared about.
Apparently they'll be open sourcing it on August 18th, one week from now.
So is the language itself proprietary licensed, with standard library Apache 2?

Am I understanding the current state of things correct?

What in the world would posses the modular team to attach those horrendous AI generated thumbnails to each blog post? It makes it feel cheap, even though I know the project has some really serious technical expertise behind it.
See their in-depth vision doc here:

https://mojolang.org/nightly/docs/vision/

Mojo may be interesting to me, but they should really split it from Max, which is some closed stuff I'm not interested in.

They should show some performance comparisions between PyTorch and Mojo, PyTorch+kernel compilation + Triton vs Mojo, ThunderKittens vs Mojo.

This probably has a simple answer, and is something I can easily google. But it's always been in the back of my mind, what optimizations would be possible if you took actual python code and forced 100% type annotation. Could you meaningfully speed that up at the interpreter or with some pre-processing or compilation?

EDIT: I guess this kind of answers my curiosity: https://programming-journal.org/2023/7/2/

Given the shared heritage with MLIR, one way to think about mojo: higher level IR, but still an IR. Rpython for GPUs.

But mojo is a superset, not a subset. So why not use a subset, infer what you need and generate mojo?

I've never seen this question actually presented to the company and discussed in more detail.

never has their been a language release so uninspiring
A bit odd to have a 1.0 release without Windows support.
The main downside is that usually I only choose languages that the LLM is extremely good at. (however I avoid dynamically typed).

But I hope they succeed, it's a very interesting approach. Then I will jump on it later on. S

Sorry Chris, love you but will not use a closed language.
Interesting. Heard about Mojo a few years now, never really tried it. My Python brain cannot really write C++ or Rust but still need the performance.
a systems language that reads like python is great!

python superset would have been perfect.

I do hope the language thrives and gets a community.

All the best to the modular team.

> following the standards of how mature languages (e.g. C++) evolve over time

This gave me a chuckle. When I think of languages evolving their standards, I do think of C++. But not, you know, in a good way.

> uv pip install --upgrade mojo

What's wrong with people?

first impression based on the hero image is that this is a new model for image or video generation!
I wish Modular/Qualcomm good luck with this. We would be well served with a good alternative to Cuda. I will be looking at Modcon to see how serious they are with Mojo's ecosystem. (Hopefully it won't be yet another SYCL).
Hurray!
the 1.0 release of Mojo, it's a pretty big event, of course first thing I'm greeted with is an AI slop image on the top of the blog post

awesome

Clear, useful, done
"We arbitrarily decided we are at 1.0 now, this is a major milestone."
closed source ngmi
(A) MOJO should have used rust.

(B) MOJO should should have used Nvidia.

Creating a new language in the age of AI seems kind of pointless. I don't write code by hand anymore, I only review it and I prefer it to be in a language which I already know since investing time in learning another language doesn't make sense at this point.