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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
