The Mica Compiler — A Technical Portrait
The canonical technical reference for the Mica compiler: architecture, type system, code generation, optimization, ELF output, and roadmap direction.
The Mica Compiler Project
One developer. Two and a half years. One real compiler.
It started in late 2023, inspired by Niklaus Wirth — the Swiss computer scientist who gave the world Pascal and believed that good software should be small, clear, and honest. Wirth died on the 1st of January 2024, just days after this project took its first steps. That coincidence shaped everything that followed.
The language that emerged has Pascal's readability and C's reach: statically typed, natively compiled, no garbage collector, no external dependencies, direct access to every C library on Linux. The compiler — 75,545 lines of pure Go — was built entirely from scratch, without LLVM, without GCC, without shortcuts.
This site is organized around learning the language and documenting the compiler.
Learning
Practical language material for getting started with Mica and working through real examples.
Documentation
Technical portrait, optimizer deep dives, roadmap, backlog, and the long-form compiler notes moving onto the site.
Articles
The human story, release writing, and the genuinely post-like material that remains in the blog section.