Mojo: The New Programming Language That Could Revolutionize AI Development

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving fields of technology today. However, developing and deploying AI applications is not an easy task. It requires a combination of high-level programming skills, low-level hardware optimization, and compatibility with various frameworks and libraries.

Python is the most popular programming language for AI research and development, thanks to its simplicity, readability, and rich ecosystem. However, Python also has some limitations when it comes to performance, portability, and scalability. Python code often needs to be rewritten or integrated with other languages such as C or CUDA to run efficiently on different platforms and devices.

That's why Modular AI, an AI infrastructure company, has created Mojo, a new programming language that aims to bridge the gap between research and production. Mojo is a superset of Python that inherits its syntax and compatibility with the Python ecosystem, but also adds features such as low-level systems programming, advanced compilation, and metaprogramming.

Mojo leverages MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation), a compiler framework developed by Google and LLVM that allows for cross-platform optimization and code generation for various targets, including CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, and other AI accelerators. Mojo code can run faster than C++, more hackable than CUDA, and as safe as Rust.

We are unveiling Mojo🔥 early, but we expect it to become a full superset of 🐍 Python 3 over time… and open source as it matures. Go to https://t.co/bhbmGy7hYb to check out Mojo🔥 pic.twitter.com/dcsSOCqfr6

— Modular (@Modular_AI) May 2, 2023

Mojo was unveiled on May 2nd, 2023, and is currently available as a hosted development environment called Mojo Playground. Developers can sign up for access and try out the language features and examples. The Mojo standard library, compiler, and runtime are not yet available for local development, but they are planned to be released in the future.

Some of the goals of Mojo as a member of the Python family are:

• Full compatibility with the Python ecosystem.

• Predictable low-level performance and low-level control.

• The ability to deploy code subsets to accelerators.

• Avoidance of ecosystem fragmentation.

Some of the features that Mojo offers are:

• Full support for Python core features such as async/await, error handling, and variadics.

• Systems programming features such as pointers, structs, unions, enums, bitfields, memory management, etc.

• Compile-time metaprogramming features such as macros, templates, generics, etc.

• Support for MLIR dialects such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.

• Support for multiple backends such as LLVM, SPIR-V, etc.

Mojo is designed to be a programming language for all of AI, from research to production. It aims to combine the best of both worlds: the usability of Python and the performance of C. With Mojo, AI developers can write code that is fast, portable, scalable, and compatible with existing frameworks and libraries. Mojo could revolutionize AI development by making it easier, faster, and more fun.

Here is the crisp of the video, in case you want to skip watching:

In a world where Python reigns supreme in the field of artificial intelligence, there has always been one big problem: it's too slow. But fear not, because a new language is about to change everything.

Mojo, a superset of Python, is the brand new programming language that promises to be up to 35,000 times faster than its predecessor. This comes from a company founded by Chris Lattner, the creator of the Swift programming language and the LLVM compiler toolchain.

Designed specifically for programming on AI hardware like GPUs running CUDA and other accelerators, Mojo achieves this by leveraging multi-level intermediate representation to scale to exotic hardware types without a ton of complexity. It even has built-in auto-tuning to optimize your code for your target hardware.

Mojo is unique compared to other modern systems languages like Rust, Zig, Nim, and so on because it's designed as a superset of Python. You don't need to learn another language to take advantage of it. It does have a bunch of features on top of Python, like VAR and LUT declarations and structs, but the base language is fully compatible with Python. It can also interop with the Python ecosystem, which means you can still use your favorite libraries like NumPy, Pandas, etc.

Adding strong type checking to the language, Mojo allows you to use dynamic types if you prefer, but static types are essential for optimized performance and error checking for memory management. It has an ownership system and borrow checkers similar to Rust and also supports manual memory management with pointers like C++. It's a pragmatic language that gives you safety but also the flexibility to be unsafe when needed.

Currently, Mojo is not available to the public as it's still in very early development. However, it will be open-sourced in the future, and there is a waitlist to try it out. But for those lucky enough to get early access, they're already experiencing the crazy performance gains Mojo offers. So could Mojo kill Python and C++ at the same time? That remains to be seen. You can read more about it on modular website - Mojo: A programming language for all AI developers