Simon Willison’s Weblog

4th May 2023 - Link Blog

Mojo may be the biggest programming advance in decades (via) Jeremy Howard makes a very convincing argument for why the new programming language Mojo is a big deal.

Mojo is a superset of Python designed by a team lead by Chris Lattner, who previously created LLVM, Clang and and Swift.

Existing Python code should work unmodified, but it also adds features that enable performant low-level programming—like “fn” for creating typed, compiled functions and “struct” for memory-optimized alternatives to classes.

It’s worth watching Jeremy’s video where he uses these features to get more than a 2000x speed up implementing matrix multiplication, while still keeping the code readable and easy to follow.

Mojo isn’t available yet outside of a playground preview environment, but it does look like an intriguing new project.