Mojo language by Modular and Qualcomm is now open source
The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
At ModCon 2026, Modular announced that Mojo 1.0 is fully open source under Apache 2.0, with native Windows support coming in collaboration with Microsoft. The company also launched Modular Cloud, a production service that has been quietly serving OpenRouter traffic, and expanded hardware support to AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Qualcomm accelerators. MAX is becoming source-available with an alliance program, aiming to create a common software foundation for heterogeneous AI hardware.
The opportunity in front of the ecosystem is much bigger than any single vendor's roadmap, and a foundation only works if everyone can stand on it.
- bobajeff
I'm glad that it's open source now and they are supporting a lot more hardware. There are some interesting features that I hope the language design community pays attention to.
It's built on top of MLIR so you can make compiler optimizations in a library instead of the compiler. I believe Reactant.jl has been using MLIR for optimizing higher level abstractions in Julia. Imagine a Lisp with that capability.
- joshuakelleyds
I would add quick note to this as title is misleading
* It was partially open-sourced before this. There were a lot of cool things they open sourced before like MAX for large scale LLM serving which was outperforming VLLM, Dynamo, etc on a lot of models. (super valuable GPU kernels). This is why Qualcomm acquire them imo.
* Chris (also created swift) talked in the past the reason for not fully open-sourcing was more because he wanted to get all the core design decisions right. He said this was a big thing Swift got wrong as it scaled too quickly being fully open source at the beginning.
Mojo is an awesome language, I've used it a lot as a Swift/Python lover. A couple things though
* If you want to understand Mojo spend 10x the time in MLIR before. It's just a fancy MLIR wrapper (good thing)
* They still haven't lived up to the python "superset" promise and that's the big thing preventing bigger adoption.
* https://www.spheron.network/blog/modular-max-mojo-gpu-cloud-...
- aeonflux
Does this project have any meaningful traction? Seemed like a cool idea, but I wasn't even sure what problem does it solves. Looks like its completely missing from the regular discussion / news outlets. Every 1-2 years some barely visible post/article reminds me it even exists...
- flaburgan
Summarized here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Modular-Mojo-Open-Source
This is by Chris Lattner, known for LLVM and Swift.
- tecleandor
Maybe I'm a party pooper, but given Qualcomm history, open sourcing just after acquisition feels like they don't care about it and they're going to let it die while they cut Modular in pieces and extract all the juice possible of their cloud offering.
- knlb
I had been holding off on testing out mojo till it was open sourced, and started picking it up this week.
So far I've been enjoying the language (pythonic, comptime, tile support) and plan to spend time using it to work with gpus to learn more, the puzzles are also pretty cool.
- melodyogonna
If you like C++, you're going to like Mojo (if you're looking for alternatives). Some of the semantics and designs are inspired by C++, but wrapped in a Python-like skin. The way to think about Mojo, when compared to Rust, is that it was designed by expert C++ programmers as what they imagine a good C++ will look like. When I see Rust, I see designers who loved the functional programming paradigm and wanted to make a lot of the concept mainstream. This is why some of the semantics can seem awkward if you're coming from a procedural language
- melodyogonna
I think this submission should be merged with this much older one since they link to the same post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348079