> We have committed to open-sourcing Mojo in 2026. Mojo is still young, so we will continue to incubate it within Modular until more of its internal architecture is fleshed out.
> That rules it out of any production deployment until 2026 so.
Has that stopped everyone before? Java, C#/.NET, Swift and probably more started out as closed-source languages/platforms, yet seemed to have been deployed to production environments before their eventual open-sourcing.
I don't think Java (when it was owned by Sun) nor .NET (even currently) run the risk of a VC "our incredible journey" event causing "barrel bending" nor the backing company running out of money. In the first flavor, they'd want their pound of flesh and the "our new compiler pricing is ..." would be no good. In the latter, even if they actually opened the platform on the way out, it still would require finding a steward who could carry the platform forward, which is a :-( place to be if you have critical code running upon it
I guess the summary is that neither Java [at the time] nor .NET were profit centers for their owners, nor their only reason for existing
They certainly were, because no one other than a few hardlines were writing Java or C# and VB code in bare bones editors and compiling from command line, as only the bare bones SDKs were free beer, and for the desktop.
IDEs, implementations for embedded and phones, were all paid products, IDEs by developers or their employers, the others by OEMs.
My point is the early days, JCafe, Visual Age, Visual Studio, Forte, before free beer IDEs for them became common.
Java side with Eclipse/Netbeans, .NET side with the Visual Studio Express editions.
Yes, and there is a reason for that: Both are deeply integrated in Microsofts ecosystem, and whether one likes that or not, that ecosystem is the dominant platform for desktop computing, especially in commercial settings.
> As of February 2025, the Mojo compiler is closed source
And that's where the story begins and ends for me.