Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

modular.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 272 posts

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#261

Post by zbowling »

staticfloat wrote: post #16
cube2222 wrote: post #8

This looks quite interesting with big names behind it. I'd love to see a comparison vs Julia though, which I think tried to tackle some of the same problems.

It is a little disappointing that they're setting the bar against vanilla Python in their comparisons. While I'm sure they have put massive engineering effort into their ML compiler, the demos they showed of matmul are not that impressive in an absolute sense; with the analogous Julia code, making use of [LoopVectorization.jl]( https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl ) to automatically choose good defaults…

It seems you are using N=144 where in the modular example they are doing N=1024. Significantly less computationally expensive of a calculation in this Julia example.

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#262

Post by markkitti »

chrislattner wrote: post #39
ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A major goal of Clang was to be a “compatible replacement” for GCC, MSVC and other existing compilers. It is hard to make a direct comparison, but the complexity of the Clang problem appears to be an order of magnitude bigger than implementing a compatible replacement for Python. The journey there gives good confidence we can do this right for the Python community Is it though? For Mojo to be a compatible replaceme…

Thanks for your interest, I'm pretty confident we can do this. I've been working on compilers and languages for awhile. :) Your point about LLVM compile time is great one. Mojo is architected from the beginning for fast compile times, including deeply integrated caching and distributed compilation. LLVM "isn't slow" if you don't keep asking it to do the same thing over and over again. -Chris

Julia is finally going to start storing generated native code on disk in Julia 1.9:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/47184

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#264

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

zbowling wrote: post #261
staticfloat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a little disappointing that they're setting the bar against vanilla Python in their comparisons. While I'm sure they have put massive engineering effort into their ML compiler, the demos they showed of matmul are not that impressive in an absolute sense; with the analogous Julia code, making use of [LoopVectorization.jl]( https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl ) to automatically choose good defaults…

It seems you are using N=144 where in the modular example they are doing N=1024. Significantly less computationally expensive of a calculation in this Julia example.

This is comparing Gflops which is a size normalized measurement. With N=M=K=1024, I get 127.5 Gflops on my laptop (intel i7-1185G7)

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#265

Post by Certhas »

moelf wrote: post #62
UncleOxidant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Julia is far more mature and advanced in many ways. Many folks have and will continue to push Julia forward and we wish them the best, it is a lovely ecosystem and language. There is room for more than one thing! :) In general this tends to be true. However, in this case I'm not so sure. Modular seems to have garnered a lot of investment - probably orders of magnitude more than the Julia community has been able to…

This is too real and any of the great investment of manpower (e.g. Tensorflow for Swift) if happened to Julia would probably be 10x or 100x in terms of ROI -- just look at how few devs and line of code Julia's alternative to pandas/numpy/ML/autodidf/plotting has. If Julia ecosystem can be somewhat competitive while only having part time and researchers' side project contributors, it WILL thrive if properly invested.

Julia (maybe by virtue of being a Lisp?) is tuned for the "lone genius developer" use case. Its feature set for enabling working in teams, where you'd want more well defined interfaces, explicit structure, control, checks, enforcement mechanisms for conventions, etc... seems weak by comparison with most other modern languages.

So its not so obvious that a larger investment would scale so we'll immediately. (But it might force Julia to get better with these things...)

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#266

Post by travisoliphant »

chrislattner wrote: post #20

There are a bunch of questions about Julia, so I'll do my best to give a short answer to a very long and complicated topic. Up front, Julia is a wonderful language and a wonderful community, I am a super fan. That said, Mojo is a completely different thing. It is aligned with the Python community to solve specific problems outlined here: https://docs.modular.com/mojo/why-mojo.html Mojo also has a bunch of technical a…

Congratulations on the launch and work so far! This is indeed very interesting. I believe a language like this is necessary for future progress. I have also been impressed with Julia and its progress. I would have liked to see more progress on Ahead of Time compilation and using it to write Python extension modules.

For Mojo, I'm interested in seeing how the language can be used as a path forward for the Cython community. This could be a stepping-stone towards reimplementation of Python in Mojo. For the past 3 year, I have been talking about the need for a Python-Steering-Council-recommended extension language for Python. This will be particularly important as WebAssembly keeps progressing and potentially redefining what we mean by virtualization and containers.

We have already been using LLVM extensively in Numba and there have been several explorations around MLIR and related technologies. There are several potential paths forward and I'm looking forward to finding ways to cooperate.

Understanding what will be open-source is of course, critical for that.

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#267

Post by [deleted] »

mattnewton wrote: post #123
mirekrusin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on, are you behind it? ...looks like it! This "detail" shouldn't be hidden away, it means a lot.

As a former apple eng I guess I forgot that some people don’t know who Chris Lattner is haha. There isn’t anything unscrupulous going on here he probably just thought posting under his username was enough of disclaimer.

[deleted]

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#268

Post by Shorel »

ChrisRackauckas wrote: post #31
chubot wrote: post #5

Seems like it could be interesting ... Initial impression is that the animation of Mojo code vs. Python code has a bad UX. Why not just show the code side-by-side instead of animating it and making me click? Another obvious question is how is it different than Numba and so forth? https://docs.modular.com/mojo/why-mojo.html The Mojo language has lofty goals - we want full compatibility with the Python ecosystem, we wo…

> A major goal of Clang was to be a “compatible replacement” for GCC, MSVC and other existing compilers. It is hard to make a direct comparison, but the complexity of the Clang problem appears to be an order of magnitude bigger than implementing a compatible replacement for Python. The journey there gives good confidence we can do this right for the Python community Is it though? For Mojo to be a compatible replaceme…

> Is it though? For Mojo to be a compatible replacement for Python, it would need to match the Python C ABI and the greater set of the standard library in a bug-for-bug compatible way.

Isn't this going backwards? If Mojo delivers what it is trying to do, then these libraries would be rewritten in Mojo, and the issue of having to use two languages and continuously switching between them will be avoided.

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#269

Post by sylvaticus »

dermesser wrote: post #98
ummonk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah funnily enough I think "no GC" would be a much better feature in Julia, which would make it a great language for real time applications.

This is not true at all! Julia usually being JIT-compiled makes it very unsuitable for real time applications (and there's no reason why it should be great for it). GC is the least issue here, and I say that as a fan and daily user of Julia.

Note that in Julia 1.9 (rc3 currently) and thanks to `PrecompileTools.jl` being adopted by the vast majority of the packages, the compilation latency is a dead issue... (ok, it is moved to the package installation time...)

Re: Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

#270

Post by eigenspace »

sylvaticus wrote: post #269
dermesser wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true at all! Julia usually being JIT-compiled makes it very unsuitable for real time applications (and there's no reason why it should be great for it). GC is the least issue here, and I say that as a fan and daily user of Julia.

Note that in Julia 1.9 (rc3 currently) and thanks to `PrecompileTools.jl` being adopted by the vast majority of the packages, the compilation latency is a dead issue... (ok, it is moved to the package installation time...)

PrecompileTools.jl has definitely not been adopted by the "vast majority of packages" and compilation latency is not a dead issue. There's been huge progress, and the rate of progress on this is much higher than before, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Post reply on HN