Hold up... did I miss something, is Mojo open sourced now?
Edit: No it is still not open source. There are still same promises of open sourcing eventually, but there is no source despite the URL and the website claiming it's an open language. What's "open" here is "MAX AI kernels", not Mojo. They refer to this as "750k lines of open source code" https://github.com/modular/modular/tree/main/max/kernels
This feels icky to me.
The compiler will be open-sourced in a few months.
There is a question of what benefit would it bring even if its open sourced?
Static python can transpile to mojo. I haven't seen an argument on what concepts can only be expressed in mojo and not static python?
Borrow checker? For sure. But I'm not convinced most people need it.
Mojo therefore is a great intermediate programming language to transpile to. Same level of abstraction as golang and rust.
Python has a performance problem. Most people may not need it, but many people do. Languages like Rust and Go are heavily adopted by Python programmers either trying to understand low-level concepts or looking for something more performant.
And this is before we talk about the real selling point, which is enabling portable heterogenous compute.
This is why transpilers exist.
py2many can compile static python to mojo, apart from rust and golang.
Is it comprehensive? No. But it's deterministic. In the age of LLMs, with sufficient GPU you can either:
The way mojo solves it is by stuffing two languages into one. There are two ways to write a function for example.I don't think the cost imposed by a transpiler is worse. In fact, it gets better over time. As the transpiler improves, you stop thinking about the generated code.
At this point, it might be moot. Too many people are assuming it's still a closed-source thing and will dismiss it.
Due to the closed source nature, every mojo announcement I see I think "whatever, next"
If the actual intent is to open-source, just do it, dump out whatever you have into a repo, call it 'beta'
It does matter. It already has a pretty active community and thousands of people who follow the development closely, however, most won't commit until the entire language is fully opened... including me.
Valuable technologies are not so easily dismissed
I think they should say that on their /opensource/mojo website if that's the plan. Rather, they are trying to gesture at "750k lines of open source code", when that code is only meant to be fed into their closed source MAX engine. That's a sleight of hand, bait and switch misdirection, and that's what feels icky to me.