roflcopter69 10 hours ago
Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one.

Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language.

Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!

samuell 8 hours ago
I'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time.

Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack?

Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.

samuell 7 hours ago
Maybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D
roflcopter69 6 hours ago
Can you please provide a source for this claim?
samuell 6 hours ago
No, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.
throwawaygod 43 minutes ago
But they changed their goal from being a python superset to pythonish language with great python interoperability. The only other thing they could've done differently is making the language not look like python superficially. I think chris achieved his goal of creating a language which takes full advantage of MLIR and also not repeating some of the mistakes made with swift's development.
roflcopter69 2 hours ago
I'm sorry, I read your message slightly wrong. Okay, makes sense to me.
ssivark 4 hours ago
Qualcomm seems to be assembling a whole portfolio of technologies/products aimed at

1. Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V

2. Being competitive for AI/could needs instai of just chips for phones and other edge devices.

Interesting to see bold and high-conviction moves in this direction. Tenstorrent, Modular, Ventana, Alphawave, etc.

bobajeff 9 hours ago
It's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks.

* https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...

surajrmal 8 hours ago
Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.
melodyogonna 9 hours ago
Qualcomm has acquired excellent engineering talent here, the infrastructure I've seen Modular build in the 3 years I've followed the company is insane.
melodyogonna 9 hours ago
Related, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...
bit_economist 7 hours ago
It's interesting that acquire.fyi data shows tech M&A deal volume is down 11% year to date, but total deal value is up 40%. So, fewer deals are closing in tech, but the deals that are closing are much larger. I wish we had the deal value for this one.
cocoflunchy 56 minutes ago
It's the first sentence of the article? "an all-stock deal valued at nearly $4 billion"
samuell 6 hours ago
As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.
lr1970 3 hours ago
There are multiple HN submissions on this topic and none of them gets traction. Weird...
revengerwizard 6 hours ago
Oh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.
semiinfinitely 51 minutes ago
latty gotta get his baggy
WhereIsTheTruth 2 hours ago
Of all possible acquirers, Qualcomm is the worst outcome for Mojo, rip
afr0ck 2 hours ago
Why you say that? Nuvia made a massively great success with Oryon CPUs which are now all over the place.