I don't buy the mojo hype.
The concept of compiling python has been tried again and again. It has its moments, but anything remotely important is glued in from compiled code anyways.
The concept of compiling python has been tried again and again. It has its moments, but anything remotely important is glued in from compiled code anyways.
If Mojo succeeds it will be purely based on quality of implementation, not a spark of genius.
Cython has always been advertised as a potential alternative to writing straight Python, and there are probably a decent number of people who do this. I work in computational science and don't personally know anyone that does. I use it myself, but it's usually a big lift because of the rough edges of the language and the sparse and low quality documentation.
If Cython had 10x as many people working on it, it could be turned into something significantly more useful. I imagine there's a smarter way of approaching the problem these days rather than compiling to C. I hope the Mojo guys pull off "modern and actually good Cython"!
In the end the way the industry works guarantees a endless stream of these before some combination of boredom and rentiership result in each getting abandoned. It's just a question of whether Mojo lasts 1, 3, or god willing 5 years on top.
Ideally, government or industry would get behind these projects and back them up. Evidently Microsoft is doing that for Python. For whatever reason, Cython and Pyrex both failed to attract that kind of attention. Hopefully it will be different with Mojo.
Here's to 5 years!
Cython's main benefit is very deep integration with Python (compared to eg. Rust and PyO3).
I wouldn't want to bet on "lots of work for a chance to get incrementally better."
In no way is Python more dynamic than Smalltalk, SELF or Common Lisp, which can at any given time redefine any object across the whole execution image and were/are mostly bootstraped environments.
There's Numba, CuPy, Jax and torch.compile. Arguably they are more like DSLs, which happen to integrate into Python than regular Python
Of course I don't know what Mojo will actually bring to the table since their documentation doesn't mention anything GPU specific, but the idea isn't completely novel.