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Comment by olokobayusuf | Hacker News Reader

I think us and Modular have incredibly similar visions of the end state of the world. The main difference is that they require devs to learn a new programming language (Mojo), whereas Function is designed to meet devs exactly where they are--not an inch away.

More fundamental than that is that Mojo has somewhat of a built-in assumption (I'm a bit more skeptical) that they can outperform silicon OEMs like Nvidia using MLIR (Mojo is designed as a front-end to MLIR). We have a much more conservative view: we'll rely on silicon OEMs to give us libraries we can use to accelerate things like inference; and we'll provide devs the ability to inspect and modify the generated code (C++ atm, Rust soon).

TL;DR: Devs don't have to learn anything with Function. Devs have to learn Mojo and MLIR to use Modular's offerings properly.

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Also worth noting that we're better positioned for the coming wave of LLMs writing the vast majority of code in production. Function is designed specifically for LLMs to do the transpilation step (Function simply provides rails to stack these unitary operations into user-defined functions).

Mojo has a cold-start problem here, cos there isn't enough Mojo code in the wild for LLMs to be great at writing it in volume (compare this to C++ and Rust).

Makes sense, that's definitely a downside with Mojo. But my understanding is they made this tradeoff because compiling the python code directly would not work out. So is this something that is for the function-level (hence the name) and you don't plan to do this for full programs?

Spot on! We're starting from specific functions for now, and will expand the scope if/when feasible. The challenges exist across two axes: language coverage and library coverage.

For language coverage, Function currently doesn't support classes (on the roadmap) or lambda expressions (much harder). But these are the main limitations.

For library coverage, this is where things get incredibly hairy. If a library isn't pure Python (i.e. most of the important libs), we can't compile them. We instead have to reimplement the library's functionality. For now, we plan on using LLMs to automate this as much as possible.

>If a library isn't pure Python (i.e. most of the important libs), we can't compile them.

If the library is written in C, like Numpy, can't you just link against it?

Not quite.

First, Function is designed to be truly cross-platform but libraries like Numpy aren't compiled for say WebAssembly.

Second, the native libraries are usually built around CPython interop (i.e. the C API expects to interact with the CPython interpreter). Function does not (and will never) have a CPython interpreter (we generate full AOT compiled code).

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