Update: 6.12.5 has shipped — the release article tells the full story, including what the review weeks found.

The next Mica release, 6.12.5, arrives in the next couple of weeks, and its story is one sentence: Mica gets projects, and becomes a scripting language.

Two features, built to compose:

  • The project model — a three-line mica.project beside your sources that the compiler and the editor read alike, so the diagnostics you see while typing are the diagnostics of your build, and one program can consume several separately built libraries.
  • The run mode — mica --run tool.mica (or just mica tool.mica, or a #!/usr/bin/env mica line and chmod +x) compiles and executes one file in a single command, with argv, exit codes, here-documents and shebang lines behaving exactly as a shell expects — and a script beside your project imports your libraries with no flags at all.

Both features were complete in the development line and gated by the full test ladder on both architectures. The weeks between the preview and the release were reserved for what a release deserves: comprehensive code reviews and bug fixing, so that what shipped was not the newest possible build but the most trustworthy one.

The command-line reference documents both features, and the scripting tutorial walks the whole road.