Tools AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-19

The compiler that stayed shut for four years opened three weeks after Qualcomm bought the company

Modular released the source code of the Mojo compiler and its tooling on 18 August under the Apache 2.0 licence with the LLVM exceptions — the same terms LLVM and Swift use. Mojo is the language Chris Lattner's team started in 2023 to give Python-like syntax to code that has to run at the speed of C on CPUs, GPUs and custom accelerators, and it has been open in stages: the standard library first, then hundreds of thousands of lines of kernel code, while the compiler itself stayed closed for four years. It reached version 1.0 on 11 August as part of the Modular 26.5 release. Modular says it is not yet accepting outside contributions to the compiler and hopes to by the end of the year. The timing is the notable part: Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Modular on 29 July, and the compiler was published three weeks later.

Why it mattersA language whose compiler you cannot read is a language you are renting, and that has been the single loudest objection to Mojo since it was announced. Removing it does not make Mojo win, but it does make the argument about Mojo an argument about the language rather than about the licence. The Qualcomm angle matters too: a chip company that has just bought a compiler team usually wants that compiler everywhere, which is a different incentive from a startup that wanted to sell a runtime, and Apache 2.0 is what everywhere looks like.

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✓ Verified · 4 sources

The compiler that stayed shut for four years opened three weeks after Qualcomm bought the company

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