Comment by alisonatwork

Comment by alisonatwork 2 months ago

4 replies

Sadly I think the ship has sailed and Rust has hit critical mass now. Personally I find it aesthetically awkward, but for Python integration and tooling it seems like Rust has become the default C replacement. You would think Python devs might have preferred something more superficially Pythonic like Nim or perhaps something more C-ish like Zig, but those projects don't have the same buzz so here we are. There's probably more young devs who are into Rust than C nowadays.

I am not holding out much hope for Mojo because it feels deeply embedded in the AI/LLM hype space instead of being presented to Python devs outside of that niche as a useful language extension in its own right.

melodyogonna 2 months ago

I don't think it really matters whether Rust has hit critical mass or not tbh, just the fact that it is entirely a new language to learn with very different semantics compared to Python is a blocker for many people.

Mojo right now is not much better, but I've seen Python compatibility factor into the language design and semantics again and again. It is not enough to be a language that looks like Python, like Nim, things also have to behave the same when the semantics of static typing allows.

Mojo is not deeply embedded in the AI/LLM hype, there is nothing in the language that is targeted specifically for AI. The standard Library has a GPU package for general-purpose gpu programming, but that isn't AI specific.

  • alisonatwork 2 months ago

    I am sure the language is capable, but if you search "mojo python" then the top hit is https://www.modular.com/mojo where the first line on the page talks about AI inference and the first code example seems to be referencing ML models or something completely unrelated to the everyday Python programming that people outside of the data science field do.

    Alternatively if you try to search for the Github repo for Mojo, you end up here: https://github.com/modular/modular Which is all about control planes and k8s and AI something something. Sure, it seems this is just a monorepo under which one of the folders actually is Mojo itself, but this packaging does not inspire confidence that the creators of the language are interested in building a language that exists outside of their ecosystem.

    • melodyogonna 2 months ago

      That is because the language is really just in alpha, not open-source yet, and not much useful for anything except GPU kernel programming.

      In the future that will change, Modular is aiming to get it ready for open-source by Q4 2026. By then it'll have full Python interop, so you can use existing Python packages in Mojo. Unlike Rust/Julia, Mojo does not have to bootstrap a community and ecosystem from scratch.

  • fastball 2 months ago

    Honestly I think this is a feature not a bug.

    This is going to sound elitist, but if you can grok Python but can't grok Rust then you probably shouldn't be writing ecosystem tools for Python anyway.