Mojo 1.0
Modular (tweet, beta, Hacker News):
Today, the Mojo language officially reaches 1.0: a milestone the language has been building toward since its first release in 2023. Mojo has grown into a general-purpose language with a vibrant developer community writing their own libraries, tools, and applications on top of it. With Mojo 1.0, developers can now build for the long-term on a stable, production-ready language foundation.
[…]
Importantly, Mojo 1.0 does not mark the end of the language’s evolution, but it is an important milestone on a longer journey. During the 1.x timeframe, changes should primarily be additive, giving developers confidence that the language will not continually shift beneath them. Breaking changes may still be made, but will be managed with care, following the standards of how mature languages (e.g. C++) evolve over time.
We are happy to announce that the Mojo🔥 language is now fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license (with LLVM exceptions)! The source code for the Mojo compiler, tooling, and everything else you need to build the language are now available in our
modularGitHub repository.[…]
The Mojo standard library has been accepting contributions since 2024, and we’re grateful for everyone that has helped advance the language. One learning (particularly in today’s era of AI coding) is that we need to be deliberate about how we handle contributions. As such, we aren’t ready to take contributions to the compiler and tooling. We aim to accept contributions to the compiler and tooling by the end of this year, and we’ll share more details when we can.
Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner, and Jeff Niu (2023):
This talk will give an overview of Mojo 🔥, a new programming language in the Python family built on MLIR and LLVM. Mojo aims to bridge the programmability and performance gap in systems programming by combining Python’s ergonomics and ecosystem with C++ and CUDA-level performance into a single language. We will describe how Mojo leverages the MLIR and LLVM infrastructures to provide meta-programming, user-defined code transformations, hardware backends, adaptive compilation, and auto-tuning to enable developers to achieve performance without sacrificing programmability.
Gergely Orosz (2025, tweet):
Chris Lattner is one of the most influential engineers of the past two decades. He created the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language – and Swift opened iOS development to a broader group of engineers. With Mojo, he’s now aiming to do the same for AI, by lowering the barrier to programming AI applications.
I sat down with Chris in San Francisco, to talk language design, lessons on designing Swift and Mojo, and – of course! – compilers.
See also: LPython (Hacker News).
Previously:
6 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
“Lowering the barrier to programming AI applications”
Why? If AI has taught me anything, it’s that lowering the barrier doesn’t make anything better. Do we need more of these applications?
I donnow. Lattner’s track record is kinda wonky. Yes, he does academically very interesting and even cutting-edge stuff, but on a practical level, Swift *still* feels like an academic experiment that still falls short of what made Obj C so developer friendly. It feels clever, vs thoughtful.
So is this just another academic exercise?
@Octothorpe I’ve not used Mojo, but my impression is that it’s more pragmatic and fixes a bunch of the things that he found to be mistakes in Swift.
@Octothorpe, could you give some details? I understand this is how you feel, but why?
-- Please, my question is meant with respect. And no, let's agree to leave SwiftUI out of things.
-- "...academic experiment..." "...Obj C [almost left the space out] so developer friendly...". It's this that leave me hoping you could explain. I find Swift (versus ObjC) more concise, flexible, and anymore, having a (slightly) more broad reach than ObjC.
As for Lattner... I have no real judgement, other than to say his professional accomplishments FAR exceed anything I'll ever do. I might add IMHO he (a) did the right thing with Swift (again, not SwiftUI - ws he part of that?) by making it Open Source and (b) oddly, his name doesn't come up much in negative ways regards to Apple. Maybe because he left before everything changed with [take your pick here from COVID, Liquid Glass, Butterfly Keyboards, profits from services, etc.] what seems to be a group conception of how Apple is today.
Maybe you already answered? Swift feels clever to you? ObjC is thoughtful? Okay. I'll cut my wordy comment short in the hope of it not coming across as thoughtful. Call it a "Swift" like comment. Peace!
> I find Swift (versus ObjC) more concise, flexible, and anymore, having a (slightly) more broad reach than ObjC.
Is this a joke?
ObjC is way more flexible. It’s dynamic. You can do all kinds of cool hacky things with it like swizzles. How is Swift with its 100 keywords and strict concurrency rules more flexible? I’ve swizzled my way out of dozens of bugs in Apple’s frameworks with Objective-C.
Did you mean to say:
“Swift doesn’t have square brackets so it looks more like the first programming language I learned.”
@Dave Lots of things are more concise in Swift, but some things are way more verbose. There can be a lot of ceremony around types and concurrency, where sometimes you have to spend a huge amount of effort convincing the compiler that what you are doing is correct. It prevents you from doing lots of bad stuff but can also get in the way of doing various reasonable things, too, e.g. the way deprecated APIs are handled.
