It looks like the Mojo work in parts grew out of MLIR and Lattner has repeatedly stated that he wants less compiler magic and more control in the hands of the programmer (indeed MLIR, which Clang might also move to [1], is directly exposed in Mojo).
"Faster than C" is a lot more plausible for Mojo than the claim of running arbitrary Python code eventually ;)
> he wants less compiler magic and more control in the hands of the programmer
Indeed, I can see this from their emphasis on generic SIMD, which looks pretty nice. It is nice that there is now a language with first-class SIMD support, comparing with something implemented with a library or autovectorization which may not work.
> "Faster than C" is a lot more plausible for Mojo than the claim of running arbitrary Python code eventually ;)
Seems so. I don't recall reading the claim about running arbitrary Python code, and I think requiring rewriting Python code is reasonable as normal Python code may utilize runtime reflection/dynamic type and they are hard to implement efficiently, and probably require a GC for memory management.
> It is nice that there is now a language with first-class SIMD support, comparing with something implemented with a library
If the language is flexible enough (in particular, it has to support operator overloading), I don’t see any disadvantages to implementing that in a library.
"Faster than C" is a lot more plausible for Mojo than the claim of running arbitrary Python code eventually ;)
[1] https://llvm.github.io/clangir/