Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one.

Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language.

Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!

I'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time.

Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack?

Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.

Maybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D

Can you please provide a source for this claim?

No, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.

I'm sorry, I read your message slightly wrong. Okay, makes sense to me.

But they changed their goal from being a python superset to pythonish language with great python interoperability. The only other thing they could've done differently is making the language not look like python superficially. I think chris achieved his goal of creating a language which takes full advantage of MLIR and also not repeating some of the mistakes made with swift's development.

Which is interesting given the Mojo blogs where they shit on the other pythonic eDSLs like Triton saying that it's a dead end

They've said that Mojo is still on track to be open-sourced this year, post-acquisition.

According to their website, yes it will be opensourced soon

indeed, open sourcing is only half (or even less) of the picture: who is driving the open source community and how it is driven (i.e. governing structure) are probably more important IMHO. There are countless of cases where an open source project is either killed by slow death, or dictated by a single entity. Chris's previous projects like LLVM and MLIR are fortunate enough to grow and thrive organically, and that takes years if not decades to cultivate

He already did that, Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement.

I think that was the motivation to make Mojo a superset of python.

Yes, but apparently even that ended up being a pivot, with just enough Python, and now lets see what Qualcom makes out of it.

> Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement.

This was doom to fail from the beginning.

Swift will always have the image of an Apple product binded and controlled by the Apple ecosystem. This is very unlikely to change.

Nobody sane of mind would bind there entire technology stack on something half proprietary with a support was from the beginning secondary outside of Apple platforms.

To say nothing of "Swift for TensorFlow" when Julialang was an option.

To each their own!

"first principles" and "from scratch" are predictable failure modes... he had very good reason to pursue a Python-like language given the circumstances and objectives

I think I get what you mean and I should have been more precise in my wording. I didn't mean that an alien language that looks nothing like we have ever seen but for the sake of doing it "right" from scratch would have been a good idea. A new programming language definitely should steal the ideas of other languages that turned out to be good. But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python just because there was too much design pressure to appeal to Python programmers. I wonder what Mojo could have looked like without this particular pressure. Basically, with what kind of programming language would a person with as much experience and good taste as Chris Lattner come up with if there were no such external pressures?

> But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python

Like what?

The "else" after a for-loop that executes only when the loop completely finished without a "break" or "return". While maybe a nice concept in general, using "else" for this is only to look familiar to Python programmers. The "else" word itself is really counter intuitive here in my opinion. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/control-flow/#for-loop-cont...

Then there's "foo if cond else bar" which is Python's kind of ternary operator and it's at least slightly contentious. One could argue if a language even needs such a construct, but at least for me, I have an easier time reading the control flow when I look at "cond ? foo : bar". It gets even worse when you nest that stuff, although that's something you shouldn't do anyway. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/control-flow/#conditional-e...

Also, indentation based syntax... well, it's a choice. I don't know if Lattner would have chose that in a language that he would have designed to his liking from scratch. For more, see https://mojolang.org/docs/reference/compound-statements/

Then there is some scoping related badness from Python that I think is really awful. In Python and Mojo (with a caveat) you can do this:

  if cond:
      foo = 42
  print(foo)

So the scope of a variable is function-level and Mojo adopted this and called it implicitly-declared variables (https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/variables/#implicitly-decla...) as opposed to the concept of explicitly-declared variables (https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/variables/#implicitly-decla...) they added on top which uses the "var" keyword and forces block-level scoping which I'd argue is the sane default. But no, to appease Python programmers, they have this awful function-level scoping by default and you have to opt into block-level scoping by adding a "var" in front of your variable declaration.

But earlier, I was talking about a caveat in Mojo, so it's slightly less awful, because the compiler would complain in the code example above that "foo" might be uninitialized when getting to the print statement, so that's at least something nice, where the static type system prevents stupid mistakes that function-level scoping makes possible. To be fair, all the serious type checkers for Python would catch this as well.

But I hope you get the idea. Those are things I highly doubt would have made it into the language if Lattner could have designed it to his liking from scratch.

Else on for loops is truly terrible yea. I don't understand why Python STILL hasn't come up with alternate syntax and a deprecation path.

I think the trinary op in Python is way superior to Cs, and I came to Python from C.

The variable that was never declared when you hit is bad too yea, but I don't think block level scoping is any good. Pythons rule of having just two scopes (mostly) is imo the sane thing to do. Every single block adding a scope is just chaos, and C++ really screws this up with implicit this.

> what kind of programming language would a person with as much experience and good taste as Chris Lattner come up with if there were no such external pressures?

Swift

That's what the Chris Lattner from back then came up with. I doubt that early Swift is what he would repeat exactly as it was when he would get the chance to do it these days. And current Swift definitely is far away from what he would do, I think he has been quite outspoken about that. So maybe I should make my question more precise and ask what kind of programming language Chris Lattner would come up with in 2026, having learned from all the mistakes that C++, Swift, Mojo (and many others) did?

> sorry for rambling.

You're right to ramble. I also believe that the world need a high level language fitting for accelerators that is not Python.

However developing something like that is by all means not a trivial task and many failed there.

Though, Modular should have been the team to do it. My theory is that they raised too much money too soon. With that kind of money, you get anxious investors waiting to see some magic on quarterly timelines. So Modular was forced to be compatible with Python as there's no other way to win quick developer mindshare. (Though I don't think they managed to do that either).

A closest counter path I would have expected Modular to follow was Zig or Oxide computers (I know not apples to apples comparision). Start actually attacking the problem with hindsight and lessons of 30 years of Python, build something fresh, and try to patiently win the market.

Rust is not going to win this market. The language has too much syntax friction to win over data science/AI folks and doesn't offer too much in parallel programming world. Julia, although beautiful attempt, couldn't gather enough support outside academia.

In fact, if Nvidia cuTile, Triton, Jax keep delivering, Python seems unmatched at the moment. It is likely to be in the similar position that C/C++ have been in embedded and firmware world.

> My theory is that they raised too much money too soon.

That's also my feeling. And that's the curse of many VC funded companies. And they are not even in the classical state of enshitification yet.

> Rust is not going to win this market.

Agree. Rust will never win this market. Nor Zig, which has the same genetical flaws as C++ for accelerators (excessive usage of pointer semantics among others).

> Julia, although beautiful attempt, couldn't gather enough support outside academia.

I will look mean, but for me, Julia is a language that never went to the design board. It sticked to a "Let's put Python on top of LLVM and add a proper GC" with one single objective: "let's make a clone of Python but fast".

My feeling is also that it is an academia niche and will remain one.

> In fact, if Nvidia cuTile, Triton, Jax keep delivering, Python seems unmatched at the moment.

It is, and it is honestly pretty depressing.

Triton solves most of the performance issues of Python for accelerators but also introduces one (several on fact) more DSL, one more tooling ecosystem and solves none of the (long list of) issues related to Python/Numpy programming model.

I think this is unfair to Julia. It has a strong lisp lineage, the just ahead of time compilation model is interesting and I think they were the first to make it work.

I agree that it's lacking in many ways, but it's not just Python on LLVM.

I do not think Julia ever intended to be a Python clone. Julia was created in 2009 when Python was not as popular as today.

I think the statement is a strange one to make about a language that emerged from a PhD thesis. While one could say the objectives of Julia's design were academic (e.g. multiple dispatch) and more attention could have been paid to the practical application of the approach (e.g. where and how do we cache all this machine code we are generating), I find it incredulous to say a six year long PhD dissertation process was not a design phase.

The thesis in question can be found here: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/blob/master/main.p...

Julia and the Python JITs from GPU vendors will.

Mojo already lost the moment AMD, NVIDIA and Intel decided to fully support Python and Julia.

Additionally all of the parallel programming improvements in ISO C++ are coming from them as well, Modular did not have much moat when being a follower and not a driver.

How did Mojo already lose when Qualcomm just made a $4B bet on it? You're forgetting that the language is still pre-1.0. The way I think of this... if Modular is able to remain an open platform, being part of an established corporation with existing customers is a better way to drive penetration compared to acquiring new customers.

I'm not really sure if Mojo has lost or not, but the community has felt quite different than other language communities I have encountered. The development feels less organic and more driven by venture capital. This is most acutely felt in the current closed source development of mojo itself, which seems like it will continue into the near future.

I look forward to seeing open source mojo and the community that will bring.

> The development feels less organic and more driven by venture capital

The development has been driven by the needs of Modular.

> This is most acutely felt in the current closed source development of mojo itself

Mojo compiler is closed, the language development is quite open. Some of the proposed changes have been shelved or tweaked based on community feedback. However, you should understand that the compiler is closed to avoid design by committee and bike-shedding, Modular will and does veto decisions on core language semantics, see: https://forum.modular.com/t/canonicalize-apis-around-int/253...

> which seems like it will continue into the near future.

The compiler is getting opened this August. I must admit, a lot of people who would be normally interested in the language are hesitant to poke at it with a stick with the current license (myself included).

The language has really great set of features and functionalities wrapped in a familiar syntax, I have zero doubt it'll reach mainstream adoption.

> I have zero doubt it'll reach mainstream adoption

Be careful. I said this 10 years ago about OpenCL, and I've ate crow ever since.

> I have zero doubt it'll reach mainstream adoption.

I'll gladly put $1000 in escrow as a bet that it never reaches more than 1% on literally any index of your choosing (TIOBE or whatever)

The founders won the lottery, the language most likely will never make mainstream.

Ha! I think whether Mojo will make mainstream or not is already a forgone conclusion. It solves too much of a technical problem to be niche. To me, it is a matter of when... not if.

It is not the only solution to that technical problem though. Past attempts at this have shown a clear preference for solutions that actually are extensions of CPython rather than distinct tool chains.

Past attempts at what exactly, I'm not sure I follow. Are you talking about two-language problem, heterogenous compute, or cross-platform accerelated compute stack?

With Qualcomm doubtful, but good news for the founders.

> How did Mojo already lose when Qualcomm just made a $4B bet on it?

NVDA market cap is $4.7T.

The difference between a billion and a trillion is roughly a trillion.

Lisp, see Connection Machine and Star Lisp.

Several decades of their time.

Best of all, it is actually compiled without JIT drama.

This is the reasoning behind the guys that have created a whole new Common Lisp frontend to LLVM for biochemistry research at MIT.

What is the drama with JIT? Vs AoT?

The JIT adoption drama in Python versus other programming languages ecosystems, equally dynamic.

Looked up Mojo

"Mojo aims to combine the usability of a high-level programming language, specifically Python, with the performance of a system programming language such as C++, Rust, and Zig

Mojo builds on the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) compiler software framework, instead of directly on the lower level LLVM compiler framework like many languages such as Julia, Swift, C++, and Rust.[16][17]

MLIR is a newer compiler framework that allows Mojo to exploit higher level compiler passes unavailable in LLVM alone, and allows Mojo to compile down and target more than only central processing units (CPUs), including producing code that can run on graphics processing units (GPUs), Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and other accelerators.

It can also often more effectively use certain types of CPU optimizations directly, like single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) with minor intervention by a developer, as occurs in many other languages"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_(programming_language)

>Mojo aims to combine the usability of a high-level programming language, specifically Python, with the performance of a system programming language such as C++, Rust, and Zig

Providing usability without GC is an oxymoron.

The best attempt so far for Pythonic compiled language is D, that's probably why it's not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry along side other languages comparison. D has GC by default but manual memory management is supported as well.

Probably compiler researchers need to come with truly determinstic GC like the automotive industry invented the automatic gear. So that other existing compiled programming languages with GC like Go and D can thrive.

Disclaimer: I work for Modular.

Just wanted to confirm that we're still open sourcing Mojo this year!

And appreciate the nuanced feedback.

Qualcomm has acquired excellent engineering talent here, the infrastructure I've seen Modular build in the 3 years I've followed the company is insane.

Related, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...

I call BS, zero chance this traded at $4B. The fact they describe it as a "chip company" shouldn't give confidence

Wired said ~$4B as well and linked the 8-k with the stock amount involved in the deal - based on some simple math of price at market open for the announcement + number of shares, it's directionally accurate.

It's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks.

* https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...

Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.

Still the result could be that the software performance much better on their hardware than others. Priorities, competition, etc.

Patents, and tooling portfolio.

It's interesting that acquire.fyi data shows tech M&A deal volume is down 11% year to date, but total deal value is up 40%. So, fewer deals are closing in tech, but the deals that are closing are much larger. I wish we had the deal value for this one.

It's the first sentence of the article? "an all-stock deal valued at nearly $4 billion"

As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.

There are multiple HN submissions on this topic and none of them gets traction. Weird...

It's on the front page now.

Oh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.

Qualcomm seems to be assembling a whole portfolio of technologies/products aimed at

1. Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V

2. Being competitive for AI/could needs instai of just chips for phones and other edge devices.

Interesting to see bold and high-conviction moves in this direction. Tenstorrent, Modular, Ventana, Alphawave, etc.

> Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V

The reason to move away from arm has nothing to do with performance, but rather avoiding licensing snafus like happened with their laptop chips. So far no one has delivered a risc-v core with class leading performance outside of the really low end. Not saying it can’t be done, but it will likely be a step back at first.

I'm not a hardware specialist. Qualcomm already has their custom CPU core. Can't they just switch out the frontend (fetch/decode) with RISCV and the rest shouldn't be a be big problem?

Whats peoples thoughts on Tenstorrent - they were looking for funding on Hiive recently but that deal got pulled when Qualcomm rumours surface a week or so ago.

Of all possible acquirers, Qualcomm is the worst outcome for Mojo, rip

Why you say that? Nuvia made a massively great success with Oryon CPUs which are now all over the place.

> Nuvia made a massively great success

Not true. Nuvia has had huge delays as part of the acquisition. It resulted in ARM licensing lawsuits and many more and things dragged out.

Yes, ARM sued Qualcomm, Qualcomm won, and separately Nuvia has shipped, 2, 3? times now? I don't know how it's a failure or if the delay were "huge" and "dragged out". It's not like it launched an old product or took years and years and years. 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase.

> 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase.

Yes a world of a difference. That’s competing against an Apple M2 vs M4. You’ve given yourself 2 generations of disadvantage.

You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too.

> You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too.

If Trump nuked TSMC's production lines the day before M1 went to production, and the production lines came back 3 years later, would Apple ship the M1 on it? Or, the M3?

As you point out, it makes 0 sense to ship the M1.

If it makes 0 sense, why project that idea onto me?

When faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. (and read your interlocutor's, "It's not like it launched an old product" obviates your claim that I'd also applaud Intel's delays)

> As you point out, it makes 0 sense to ship the M1.

But that's what happened. Go check the benchmarks. Clearly you haven't. That Snapdragon X that got released (1st gen) was way off the mark.

> When faced with a contradiction

When faced with a hallucination...

You switched your claim from "they released the same chip they would have released 3 years earlier and you're stupid for thinking that was a good idea" to "I thought it was slow [because I'm hyperfocused on Apple competition and forgot the perf vs. Intel/AMD]".

Nothing got switched. Go check the facts. The chip was made. It was delayed due to the lawsuits and drama. The first release was an old chip. Hence slow. All the same. You can slice it how you like.

AMD barely has laptop designs (the point here) and Intel is long dead in this space.

Hasn't pretty much everyone from Nuvia left QC at this point?

Yes, the principal designer engineer Williams just left. He made an announcement a month or two ago?

Nvidia wasn't going to buy them. Unless Mojo intended to compete toe-to-toe in the hardware space, they were destined to get bought out by a hardware underdog at some point or another.

This is where an industry-spanning consortium would have helped out, but Mojo never really built those inroads with the hardware space. They just expected everyone else to opt-in to their mercurial middleware, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why CUDA is successful.

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