[dandiep]

I don't understand the play here for Modular. If this is a worthwhile improvement that is broadly applicable, won't it at some point make it's way into Python, numpy, etc?

In Java land we had a bunch of other JVMs over the years offering better performance. Most important things got absorbed into what is now OpenJDK, and the other JVMs, if they even exist at all, are niche players.

Performance is a huge focus in Python and ML lands right now, so why would this be any different?

[sebzim4500]

They aren't just speeding up existing python code, they are making a superset of python which has additional performance features.

I guess it's possible that these features will be introduced into cpython etc. but I doubt it.

[jlokier]

Just based on their website, I think selling Mojo as a faster Python-like language isn't intended to be their main product. They place a lot more emphasis on AI/ML acceleration than on Mojo, and on creating compatibility between different AI hardware acceleration systems.

I have the impression they hope vendors of AI acceleration hardware, clusters and cloud services will be their customers, to provide uniform and heavily backward-compatible cross-acclerator AI/ML APIs to those vendors' customers.

And hope that users of those services and hardware will also pay for high quality well-researched APIs that work reliably with many different AI/ML accelerators, even if Mojo is free. Similar to how RedHat provides value through commercial-grade QA and sustained development for Linux on high-end hardware, that would be complicated and risky to use otherwise.

[gojomo]

If they've figured out how to deliver performance that Python might get around to in 5-10y, shouldn't they tout that, for people who might want that now?

Ultimately promoting the possibility for better performance, & current contrast, is good for prodding other languages/runtimes like Python to match these options. The "important things [get] absorbed" process you mention relies on teams making some "play for" alternatives, to create the impetus to get new things integrated.

[dandiep]

Totally, just trying to understand why this is a $100MM of VC money investment. Is the market that big for this? (Honest question)

[ElectronCharge]

Modular is mainly focused on improving AI related workflows as its business model. That market is easily many $billions, and I think most expect the AI industry to experience explosive growth.

[catgary]

I feel like there’s 100m of VC money here because it’s Chris Lattner’s company and he’s the best compilers person in the world right now.

[nvm0n2]

Most famous in Silicon Valley, maybe?

Kotlin is similar to Swift but arguably compiles much faster despite a suboptimal initial architecture, and avoids weird language/compiler specific problems never before seen, like expressions that time out whilst compiling.

Graal is similar to LLVM but can compile a far larger range of languages, is actually used for both JIT and AOT compilation (does anyone use llvm jit in prod?), and has many innovations LLVM never could have even tried to have.

So it's not really clear that he's the best compiler person in the world. More like, the people doing the other stuff aren't in California so don't get the same level of attention.

[pjmlp]

One of, yes.

Not the best, and already has failures like Swift for Tensorflow.

[Takennickname]

This is an investment in the team not the idea.

[pjmlp]

Plenty of OpenJDK alternatives still exist, just like there are several C and C++ compilers.