Chris Lattner and Modular Announce Mojo, a New Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

Chris Lattner and Modular Announce Mojo, a New Programming Language

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https://docs.modular.com/mojo/

> With Mojo, you can write portable code that’s faster than C and seamlessly inter-op with the Python ecosystem.

Doubtful. Still reading the docs, but noting

> We don’t want to rely on fancy tricks (like JIT compilers) to make things faster

Moved rest of comment about language to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35790367

Chris Lattner made a beautiful language in Swift before it got super complex.

Hopefully this around, they will keep the core of the language small. And have it extensible like the way clojure does things.

If they can build the dev community around this successfully, which I think they can, this will be such a huge gain for the entire ecosystem.

While the technology sounds quite useful to me, my user experience isn't off to a good start, unfortunately.

The "Try Mojo" page[1] currently says: "The Mojo standard library, compiler, and runtime are not available for local development yet, so we created a hosted development environment where you can try it out. We call it the Mojo Playground!"

Not being able to try it out locally, even if it may not be that mature yet and may come with no support, is frustrating.

To use the "Mojo Playground", however, you have to sign up for an account.

Having to sign up for an account is even more frustrating.

The "Try Mojo" page also says: "To provide the best experience possible, the Mojo Playground currently supports a limited number of people. We plan to scale up quickly so everybody can get access over time."

I haven't tried signing up for an account, but that wording makes me think that signing up will probably just put me on a waiting list of some sort, rather than giving me instant access.

Being unsure if signing up will actually give me instant access is frustrating.

If I were to sign up and then I had to wait before using it, that would be even more frustrating and really disappointing.

Unfortunately, those frustrations have already tainted my first impression of this technology.

Artificial bureaucratic limitations from the start, like restricted access and requiring accounts without a good reason, are really distasteful to me.

[1] https://docs.modular.com/mojo/get-started.html

Hey VancouverMan, I'm sorry you're disappointed. We're still just at the start of this journey, not the end. Mojo is still quite young, and while we have high expectations (and a lot of experience in doing this sort of thing), it will take time to fully roll it out.

I'm thrilled to see you're interested though, if you want to chat more directly, please join our discord forum!

-Chris Lattner

I was super excited after seeing the demo, but have to echo the parent. Not really looking for a journey, just wanted to try the language & engine out locally. Will check back in a few months/years.

> Up to 35000x faster than Python

If their language is Turing complete, then I'd bet there are things Python does 35000x faster than Mojo too.

How do you figure?

It seems entirely plausible to me that one could design a slightly-less-dynamic language, using Python-compatible syntax, which meets or outperforms Python on every benchmark which can be written in both languages.

how is it related to turing-complete?

I mean, if python has some unnecessary performance-killing while loops hidden inside, it can be 35000x slower for everything regardless of 'turing-complete'

Non sequitur. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur

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