Swift creator brings new AI programming language to the Mac

Mojo flame logo

The development of Mojo has been led by Chris Lattner, who was the main driver behind Apple's Swift programming language. While at Apple, he also worked on Xcode, before briefly moving to Tesla, then to the Google Brain AI project in 2017.

In 2022, he co-founded Modular AI, which is the firm behind the new Mojo.

"Mojo is a new programming language for AI developers that will grow into being a superset of Python over time," says the company. "It already supports integrating with arbitrary Python code seamlessly and has a scalable programming model to target performance-critical systems, including accelerators (e.g. GPUs) that are pervasive in AI."

Modular originally launched Mojo on May 2, 2023, with a Mojo Playground tool. It was followed by a Linux edition in September 2023.

"[In] just over a month we've seen tens of thousands of downloads and amazing community projects," said the firm's Shashank Prasanna in a blog post. "[From] all the feedback we received, one request stood out on Discord, on social media and was the most upvoted feedback on GitHub."

"We heard you loud and clear, and today, we are excited to share that Mojo is now available on Mac (Apple Silicon)," it continues.

The company also says that it is possible to use Mojo on Intel-based Macs, "via Docker containers."