Mojo is a programming language designed to combine the performance of C and the usability of Python, for the purposes of AI related initiatives and tasks, which require a high-performance system. 

Last week, the company behind Mojo, Modular, announced that it would be open-sourcing the core modules of the language using the Apache 2 license. 

“We have always believed that building Mojo in the open will lead to a better result, because it allows its design to be shaped by the feedback from the broader community. We released Mojo very early and have been driving steady improvements since May of 2023 (see the changelog). Building a language and its infrastructure is hard work and takes time, and we’re excited to move from sharing our work to collaborating with Mojo developers worldwide,” Modular wrote in a blog post. 

Because Mojo is a superset of the Python language, its syntax will be very familiar to Python developers. However, it also incorporates features of systems programming such as strong type checking, memory safety, and next-generation compiler technologies.  

“The Mojo language has lofty goals: we want full compatibility with the Python ecosystem, we want predictable low-level performance and low-level control, and we need the ability to deploy subsets of code to accelerators. Additionally, we don’t want to create a fragmented software ecosystem—we don’t want Python users who adopt Mojo to draw comparisons to the painful migration from Python 2 to 3,” the Mojo docs says.