#python

waynerad@diasp.org

"Mojo vs Rust: is Mojo faster than Rust?"

"Rust was started in 2006 and Swift was started in 2010, and both are primarily built on top of LLVM IR. Mojo started in 2022 and builds on MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation), which is a more modern 'next generation' compiler stack than the LLVM IR approach that Rust uses. There is a history here: our CEO Chris Lattner started LLVM in college in Dec 2000 and learned a lot from its evolution and development over the years. He then led the development of MLIR at Google to support their TPU and other AI accelerator projects, taking that learning from LLVM IR to build the next step forward: described in this talk from 2019."

"Mojo is the first programming language to take advantage of all the advances in MLIR, both to produce more optimized CPU code generation, but also to support GPUs and other accelerators, and to also have much faster compile times than Rust. This is an advantage that no other language currently provides, and it's why a lot of AI and compiler nerds are excited about Mojo. They can build their fancy abstractions for exotic hardware, while us mere mortals can take advantage of them with Pythonic syntax."

The article goes on to describe Mojo's native support for SIMD which stands for "Single Instruction, Multiple Data" and refers to special instructions that have been part of CPUs for a long time but are hard to use.

Mojo frees memory on the last use of an object, instead of waiting for when an object goes out of scope, a subtle difference that makes a big difference in the field of AI, "where freeing an object early can mean deallocating a GPU tensor earlier, therefore fitting a larger model in GPU RAM." It's also advantageous in a type of optimization called tail call optimization that applies to recursive functions.

Mojo vs Rust: is Mojo faster than Rust?

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