ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner

Yeah, except Mojo’s license is a non-starter.

Wow, just checked it out, and they distinguish (for commercial purposes) between CPU & Nvidia on one hand, and other "accelerators" (like TPU or AMD) on the other hand. For other accelerators you need to contact them for a license.

https://www.modular.com/blog/a-new-simpler-license-for-max-a...

Yes; in particular see sections 2-4 of [0].

They say they'll open source in 2026 [1]. But until that has happened I'm operating under the assumption that it won't happen.

[0]: https://www.modular.com/legal/community

[1]: https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq/#will-mojo-be-open-sourced

Same

> I'm operating under the assumption that it won't happen.

Or, arguably worse: my expectation is that they'll open source it, wait for it to get a lot of adoption, possibly some contribution, certainly a lot of mindshare, and then change the license to some text no one has ever heard of that forbids use on nvidia hardware without paying the piper or whatever

If it ships with a CLA, I hope we never stop talking about that risk

To my naive mind, any language that is controlled by a single company instead of a non profit is a non-starter. Just look at how many companies reacted when Java license change happened. You must be either an idiot or way too smart for me to understand to base your business on a language like Mojo instead of Python.

It's hard to think of a language for server side programming that I could go back and recommend to build their business on 20 or 30 years ago than java. I don't think aws or even Google regret it. Think of the amount of profitable requests being processed by the jvm all over the world for years by every kind of business.

Yeah, but whose JVM are they running on? I’d be surprised if they’re all paying the lawnmower.

That's just because oracle are assholes but not that big of assholes.

If OpenJDK did not or could not exist, we would all be mega fucked. Luckily alternative Java implementations exist, are performant, and are largely indistinguishable from the non-free stuff. Well, except whatever android has going on... That stuff is quirky.

But if you look at dotnet, prior to opensourcing it, it was kind of a fucked up choice to go with. You were basically locked into Windows Server for your backend and your application would basically slowly rot over time as you relied on legacy windows subsystems that even Microsoft barely cared to support, like COM+.

There were always alternative dotnet runtimes like Mono, but they were very not feature complete. Which, ironically, is why we saw so much Java. The CLR is arguably a better designed VM and C# a better language, but it doesn't matter.

That's definitely true. But we are talking about now, aren't we? A decision of which language to use today is very different from the considerations 20/30 years ago.

OpenJDK is mainly developed by Oracle employees, the other big one OpenJ9 is developed by IBM, everything else like Azul, PTC, Aicas, microEJ,.... are commercial.

How do you feel about CUDA?

You don't really have a choice, and the alternatives are worse. Plus, it's not the same question as choosing a language -- this is more about choosing hardware vendor their SDK where options could be either plenty or very limited depending on what you work on.

Yeah and dotnet is developed by MS. What matters is it's open source, and that's literally the only reason we're even talking about dotnet right now.

Dotnet was on a slow roll to complete obsolence until MS saw the writing on the wall and open sourced it.