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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 :)

This page really helped me to put it into perspective against Python:

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

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 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.

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 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/

Do you mean the Modular site or the Mojo site? https://mojolang.org/ makes some clear statements.

Python, but good.

Compare the same algorithm/program in Python and C and that's roughly your answer, no?

> 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.

C and C++ were closed source for quite some time, they still are in places like commercial embedded OSes and console dev kits, even when they happen to be GCC and clang forks nowadays.

Clang actually has replaced most GCC forks exactly because vendors can keep the fork closed source.

Pydantic is mainly about making Python strongly typed.

Mojo addresses the actual need to write code in other languages, such as C++ or CUDA, for low level and hardware specific work.

But I wonder if it has already missed the AI hype cycle, when a lot of low level code is being written. I'm not sure how the developer ecosystem will react now.

Their website has a banner suggesting news about open sourcing of the compiler at some Aug 18 convention.

They are going to open source it eventually

Yeah, I just assumed that it was some sort of image generation crap >_< It's funny how this affects me tbh, I think it has almost the same effect as if there would be a boner-pills ad there or something. Or a 'subscribe to read' popups.

It's all just spam, filler content and I did not ask for that.

I know right? Would be better to have a banner with the language logo than some totally out of place aislop image, almost makes you think this is a random person's blog and not the official Mojo site

I spotted the exact same thing with the AI image. makes the whole thing immediately feel cheap, it's wild

A lot of software engineers don't have a good feel for this kind of aesthetics or social outcomes. They're playing with their new toy (which is very exciting, let's not ignore that), they're happy it does stuff, but ignore that it can be perceived as ugly and cheap by others. As well as totally bland - every other cheap company is using it too.

"Normal" keeps getting more and more depressing.

Did they think that image would make them look fun or interesting? Because it's exactly the opposite.

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

Yeah, that really made me triple-check if I visited a fake SEO spam website instead of the official OpenCV one. The fact that their blog looks exactly the same every single low-effort AI content farm doesn't help either.

Isn't Mojo expressly for building AI frameworks? It isn't really needed or special as a language by-itself. It's main purpose is to make it easier to program these high end graphics cards for AI.

So maybe an AI image isn't the worst.

> I guess that's the new normal.

Yes, so basing confidence on it is totally bogus. Such comments are cheap and add nothing to the discussion of Mojo reaching 1.0 status.

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

It absolutely was, but IMO was never going to happen. Python has a reputation as a simple language, but it really isn’t. It’s a very complex language hiding behind friendly syntax.

I think once the Mojo team realised that, they had to adjust their expectations.

They moved the goalposts. I think the landscape has changed since their initial Python superset pitch.

It seems like a deliberate pivot towards creating an AI-era language which make GPU programming as easy as writing Python.

It's probably very messy and not a great baseline for outside contributors to start create PRs.

That's the favorable interpretation, atleast.

My guess is that the compiler will be opened next week at Modcon. Honestly? I'm surprised Mojo 1.0 is being released now; I had thought it would be released at Modcon along with the compiler source code, but oh well, 18th August isn't far now.

Who said anything about 4 months? Your "logic" seems to be that they are releasing it in 2026 and there are 4 more months in 2026 so they will be releasing it in 4 months. That's obviously flawed thinking. They will probably be releasing it coincident with their August 18 conference.

Completely true, but Mojo approaches the problem from a different angle. Where Julia aims to blend fast and slow code seamlessly, Mojo's solution is to have a set of opt-in semantics that ensure fast code.

The design and intellectual heritage of Julia and Mojo couldn't be more different though. Mojo is a Swift/Rust style language from industry veterans, Julia is a Lisp built to make academics write faster code.

Well, there was $300M+ in VC money and after burning through some percentage of it those investors wanted an exit. I don’t think this is so much about founders taking a deal as it is investors demanding that exit.

$3.9 billion is not an acquihire!

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

The fact that they release 1.0 without doing this, I think says a lot. I personally haven't even started looking into Mojo because of the closed source stuff, but usually you can tell what's going on by looking for what's obviously missing.

They kind of did. It has a separate website now [1] . All the docs, announcements, roadmap, some comparisons as you asked are there. So they do seem to be working towards separation.

1. https://mojolang.org/

Aren’t they already separated? Max is an inference runtime, written in Mojolang, which uses the MLIR compiler chain to target diverse accelerator hardware.

They're open sourcing it next week. It's in TFA

The premise of Mojo used to be that it was a superset of Python so in theory LLMs would benefit from that but I'm not sure how much divergence there's been

Are you aware of this?

https://github.com/modular/skills

Are there any benchmarks on which languages models perform best?

You may have heard of it already, but Nim has existed in this space for some time.

Take a look into numba, you add a decorator to your function and it turns it into compiled code.

like finding a rock of gold underground and tossing it away because it’s dirty?

Pointless? If compiled mojo is faster, more memory-safe, and more hardware independent, that doesn’t seem pointless at all to me.

(And now in the age of LLMs, the barriers to get started with a new programming language are lower than ever)

Do you know CUDA or Triton? The point of Mojo was to replace GPU kernel programming langs with a Pythonic one that was more familiar

this language predates the rise of "AI" (you probably mean harnessed LLMs, but I'll forgive you) by several years. This is the 1.0 release.

Sounds like you're just lazy. Which is fine. You'll probably have a okay career. But not a great one.