Mojo is now open source!

Lichtso

Technically soruce available now with the promise of accepting contributions (thus becoming fully open source) early next year. But since it is an Apache 2 license (like the rest of the LLVM project) you are already allowed to fork and contribute to your own fork right now, just no upstreaming. For many the closed source nature of the compiler was a knock-out criterion. We will see if Mojo can gain traction now or if it has missed its window of opportunity.

totalperspectiv

This is really exciting. I've been using Mojo off and on for side projects over the last two years. (copying from some previous Mojo threads) It's got an ownership system adjacent to Rust, comptime similar to Zig, and a first class dependent type system. Even more exciting, is that uses LLVM (to the best of my understanding) in some novel ways and for more optimizations.

melodyogonna

Related post with relevant pr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347777

ChrisArchitect

Related: Mojo 1.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261128

melodyogonna

Such an exciting time for Mojo, I don't think people realize just yet the innovation being brought to fore here.

setopt

Very exciting. Closed source was one of the main things making me not try it out yet. Any good resources for getting started? And anything on doing NumPy/SciPy-like stuff in it?

mrbonner

So I think the permissive license like Apache 2 without opening up for upstream contributions would be the way of future open source development. In a very similar way of SQLite. It definitely will help shield off a bunch of AI generated contributions first and foremost and then, aligning mental model with the human contributions with Mojo leader team.

SwellJoe

As long as it was proprietary, I could ignore it. Now, I guess I have to learn a little something about it.

ModernMech

"Modular Confidential (obviously), May 14, 2022" lol, feels like espionage https://github.com/modular/modular/blob/main/KGEN/docs/Desig... Compiler walkthrough https://github.com/modular/modular/blob/main/KGEN/docs/MojoC...

melodyogonna

One of my favourite features of Mojo is linear types and how deeply they have been integrated into manual memory management - see: https://x.com/melodyogonna/status/2085089269484343725?s=20 . When I first learned about linear types, my first thought of the use case was making manual allocations and deallocations safer without sacrificing usability, but I didn't know what that could look like; now I do. This is great because in Mojo, pointers are surfaced a lot more than in, say, Rust, but such sharp tooling in a language you expect to be safe by default can be problematic. Linear types, combined with the origin system, give the language a lot of flexibility; it is like using a sharp tool with a safety glove: the tool isn't any less sharp, but the chances of accidentally injuring yourself are reduced.