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Comment by woadwarrior01 | Hacker News Reader

The value has already been materialized. They were acquired by Qualcomm for $3.9 billion.

The value has been speculated on. It doesn't mean the value has materialized.

Wow, so Lattner became a billionaire. Pays to be in compilers.

For once. A former colleague once quipped: The only way to make decent money in the business of language runtimes is to get a job at a big company that depends on it.

Yeah, feels kind of odd to phrase it like that when he's already created more than one world famous compiler before this one.

TBF, he has done more than his fair share of time working in BigTech.

Sure, but that doesn't mean he made billions before!

That’s insane, for a language that seems to be Temu-Python.

OTOH Python itself is the world’s most popular programming language, yet has only recently had the money to support more than a single full-time developer.

What else are you going to write CUDA kernels in that will be better than Mojo?

This doesn't compete with Python.

Like if someone wrote a competitor to VHDL that looked like TEMU Python... Python would not be its competitor, VHDL would.

Julia is actually quite nice for this. If you prefer a python-like approach consider Triton from openai, numba (https://numba.pydata.org/) or CuTe DSL from Nvidia.

Python tooling from NVidia itself, which generate the same PTX as CUDA C++.

Julia

lol no

NVidia is of another opinion.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/cutile-jl-brings-nvidia-cu...

it's legitimately among the best languages for writing GPU kernels

As someone who writes GPU kernels in Julia, yes it is. But Mojo is one of the few alternatives based on technical merit alone. Each language is better in different metrics, and it could be argued either way.

License-wise, Mojo reminds me of paid Borland compilers that were in vogue before I was born. Even if it's open-sourced, what incentive does Qualcomm have to maintain a happy path for Metal deployment? Mojo might actually be the best way to program Apple GPUs (on a technical level) and it would still lose due to politics.

If it's open sourced, Qualcomm won't need to worry about Metal support. If Mojo is popular enough, Apple might get involved. If not, no doubt there'll still be Apple users that want Mojo support, and are willing to work to get it.

Look at the Asahi Linux effort, for instance...

It almost feels like they were paying more in the hopes of owning the next LLVM or Swift based on the name on the tin rather than basing the price on the product itself.

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